Got me some N97

Hi,

Yesterday I finally got onto the bandwagon of the N97. I've read a lot about it, the ups and downs, got to try it out for myself and finally got one.

At first I thought it was going to be a big change from the 7710 and the N96. And it is and isn't both at the same time.

On the one hand it does most of what the N96 did and even adds a few things, and from the old 7710 back is the touch interface, the handwritting window and a few other tricks. But on the whole it doesn't add a lot more than adding touch to S60. I won't repeat what has been said ad-nauseum. Instead I'll focus on the topic and reason why I got this. Can you guess?

Well to play videos of course.

There's nothing really new or added that I've discovered so far from the N96 features. The old post I made last year about what settings to use still pretty much applies and there are some minor drawbacks even when compared to N96.

To start, some WMV videos that used to play correctly in the N96 seem to stutter in the N97. It could be that the CPU is indexing still some data since I just got the device but it's odd. Other than that videos that are in an aspect ratio of 1.77 (16x9) play great. So my old VGA and QVGA videos will need to be re-encoded to play better in this new screen format.

Also worth nothing is that the best resolution to use in this device will be 640x360 (native resolution) but doing some testing I found the PSP old resolution (368x208) to also work great. Not only is this the correct aspect ratio but for the size of screen it's sharp enough thus saving some CPU power and size.

I also ran into problems playing H264 videos even though they're playing fine in the N96. I had the same problem when moving from the N95 to the N95 8GB then to the N96. There are subtle differences in what they support. This is a big headache, I think with each new model the support will be expanded while keeping compatibility but alas this is not the case.

Some have claimed that H264 support is not there for the initial firmware release, I can't confirm this but I can't get H264 videos to play either. Maybe future releases will fix this as it stated in Forum Nokia that N97 DOES support H264.

TIP: Just like in the N96 and other newer models when you load a lot of content (videos, music, photos), the phone goes into indexing mode in the background. Everything slows down to a crawl and it can take 5 minutes or more to finish indexing everything (loaded 700 songs, 15 videos and 30 photos). Even though there's an option to Refresh Library, this doesn't work like it used to in the N95 or N91, you just have to leave it alone and wait until the contents show up. The device should provide some indication that it's doing this.

TIP: Don't shut off your phone or take out the battery right after loading contents, doing so could corrupt the databases.

Another thing I noticed is that the N97 doesn't support user created thumbnails like the previous models. Even if you load the picture with the video the "Videos and Photos" applications will create their own thumbnails which is a drawback as many of them are just a black screen or whatever is the beginning of the video. If you have several movie trailers you will get a bunch of icons with the green start screen. :(

TIP: When playing video you can stretch, or zoom to fill the screen useful for different aspect ratios.

TIP: You can use the rocker key to control playback. Center select acts as Play/Pause. Up and Down is FFW/REW and left and right control the volume.

Well this is the first couple of days of using it, hopefully with more time with it I will learn some workarounds to get more performance out of the video playback. Also I'm waiting for CorePlayer and DIVX to release their versions for this phone.

Until next time, keep on reading.