Nokia N97 looks to be a solid mobile contender

There is no doubt that the iPhone's meteoric rise in the mobile market has other phone manufacturers scrambling to incorporate similar features in their new models, and the latest offering from Nokia goes one step beyond emulation. 

The Nokia N97 is a 3G phone that offers a single point touch resistive screen along with a slide out QWERTY keyboard.  The device's home screen features a widget customizable layout, with drag and drop ease of configuration.  The programs offer the finger friendliness of flicking, allowing the user to quickly slide through lists of songs or photos.

The N97 comes standard with an impressive 32GB of memory, and there is a MicroSD slot for additional storage.  The display comes in with a 640x360 pixel resolution, giving the phone more memory and a better display than the current iPhone or G1.  Another nice addition is that the phone supports flash.   This allows it to browse flash enabled web sites, something that the iPhone, with its purposeful exclusion of the web standard plugin, cannot do.  That is you can watch Hulu videos, among others,  on this phone.

The phone snaps a 5 megapixel picture, and captures video at 640 x 480, good enough for a DVD.  But taking a picture is not much good when you are lost, and navigation is a breeze with the N97.  The phone offers assisted GPS, but a really cool feature is a built in compass that will automatically orientate a map based on your position.  And since you now know where you are, you can automatically send your position to friends with its social location app.  The phone features Maps 3.0, which includes topo and 3D maps.  This could be one of the first navigation phones that could be handy on the trail as well as the road.  The software supports PC route syncing  and sharing routes with others. 

The phone has the memory and the hardware, but that comes with a price.  The unsubsidized price is reaching about $700, but that should fall as it is picked up by major carriers.  While the phone does have Wi-Fi support, this is probably one phone that works best while connected to a solid data stream.