Nokia N97 review

We also liked the Flash support that allowed us to watch videos easily on the Web, but we really missed multitouch zoom. Web pages are full of tiny links that desperately need zooming, and that's a multi-tap process with the N97.

When surfing in full-screen mode, first you have to bring up the menu, then click the zoom icon, then tap or drag a slider to zoom in or out. You can't centre on a particular point, like you can with gesture-based zoom, and the menu partially obscures the page, so it takes some guesswork to decide when you've zoomed enough.

Touching the void
The convoluted zoom menu highlights usability issues throughout the N97's user interface. It's improved a great deal since we saw the interface on a pre-production model, and it feels much more responsive and finger-friendly, but there are still a few things that keep it from being fingertip heaven.

The N97 is fairly wide

For example, when looking at a long list of music tracks, you can scroll up and down easily with a finger, but it's a slow process. There's no flicking up and down with abandon, like with the iPhone, and no animations or behaviours to give the interface a feeling of responsiveness and liveliness.

In fact, the user interface is dull throughout, and it suffers from a lack of a touchscreen-focused graphic design. We would have blamed the Symbian S60 operating system, which has been grafted onto a touchscreen interface, but we happen to be testing the new Samsung i8910 HD -- formerly known as the Omnia HD -- which uses the same Symbian OS to power a touchscreen interface. It has many of the same drawbacks, such as lack of multitouch capability, but its bright, luscious icons encourage you to start tapping, and built-in applications such as the music player are much more modern-looking.

The in-browser zoom menu is too convoluted for our tastes. We'd prefer to see multitouch zoom

One irritating quirk that both phones share is that, in some menus, you have to tap twice to open an option. For example, in the music menu, you tap once to select a song and then tap again to play it. It's double the work for our lazy fingers and it makes the interface feel sluggish and confusing.

Home is where the widget is
The homescreen does a much better job of showing what can be done. It can show six customisable widgets, including ones for live news feeds and Facebook updates. There are also groups of application shortcuts and a little version of the music player, so you can play, pause and skip tracks from the homescreen.

We like that the position and content of the widgets can be changed, but all those options mean the interface isn't as intuitive as that of some other phones. For example, the widgets can be dragged around with a finger, but only after navigating a couple of levels of menu options. Unfortunately, we also found the widgets rather buggy. A few times our Facebook and weather widgets were squished up into a corner, although they did right themselves after a restart.