The N97 has been a while coming. It has a dream set of specifications – a large touchscreen, impressive five megapixel camera, 32 GB of inbuilt storage with expansion, and a full QWERTY keypad. The phone itself is not too wide and will fit most palms fine. It's long, owing to the large 3.5-inch touchscreen. It's well built for the most part, the only let down being the plastic and tacky feeling battery cover.The front bezel has a finish akin to polished black granite and there are just three keys on the facia - two soft keys for accepting/rejecting calls and one button for the main menu, finished in the same burnished chrome as the outer bezel. Overall, the phone looks slick. The QWERTY slides out from the left side; upon activating the slide mechanism the screen slides upwards with a slight angle maintaining visibility even if the keypad is flat on a table; the slider looks delicate but after three weeks we couldn't detect any flaws in the slick action.

There is only so much a resistive touch can achieve, and accuracy while scrolling or even when selecting highlighted menus is not possible until you get used to the device. In short, the touch interface on the N97 is much less responsive, accurate and usable as the Apple iPhone's interface. However, Nokia has time to iron out such bugs with future N-series devices. There are a lot of applications and games bundled with the N97, including the PC game Spore. A nifty SMS reader reads out SMSs to you in a rather monotonous male tone. Another application, Qik, allows streaming of videos as your camera captures them - live. Unfortunately Qik needs the internet (GPRS)and does not use Wi-Fi.

The camera quality is good, slightly better than the Nokia N96 - good detail and colour and the flash is effective up to four feet. Music quality is good via the bundled headphones, but the loudspeaker is lacking. In comparison to the N95 8 GB the loudspeaker sounds slightly tinny and the richness of vocals is lost; there is also a lack of bass that makes music less enjoyable. Audio is a couple of volume notches lower than the N95. The slider tray mechanism for the SIM card is neat. The QWERTY keypad is a mixed bundle. While key spacing is good, the keys themselves are tiny and don't give adequate feedback. Although the small spacebar placed to the extreme right may be viewed as quirky by some, we got used to this pretty soon - the key feedback and tiny size takes longer. The four-way navigation button and centre button placed to the left of the keypad is a blessing. The onscreen keyboard is well laid out and large spacing helps. The font is highly legible, though boring looking. sWith the onscreen keyboard, multiple fast key presses with predictive text disabled is tough. We preferred the keypad to the Xperia X1, though.

Call quality is impressive. At Rs. 36,166, the N97 commands a flagship price and for that price we have to say you get quite a lot of phone in terms of hardware. But it seems like the interface hasn't matured enough to keep pace with thebrilliance under its hood, and using the phone leaves one with the opinion that things could be and should have been much better. Firmware updates will resolve some quirks (we hope), but Nokia needs to spend more time with the Symbian touch-based platform and move to a capacitive touch based interface.

The N97 has been a while coming. It has a dream set of specifications – a large touchscreen, impressive five megapixel camera, 32 GB of inbuilt storage with expansion, and a full QWERTY...