Calls
My missed call rate went up. Not sure why though.... Maybe because the silent mode indication is not good and it’s easy to switch into low volume mode using hardware key without intending to.
Had to urgently switch my SIM to my Nokia phone for a meetingwhen I got into a room where signal reception is low
"Call" experience wise I prefer my Nokia 5800
Vibration mode in so low in this that it makes N97 vibration mode look strong :)
May take some time getting used to life without a silent mode and living with just a single volume hardware control. Didn’t work well enough for me.
Dialer screen shows me list of all calls- my calls, missed calls, received calls all in one view. Sometimes useful
Contact list scrolling not as good as iphone. Need to make a quick call to someone not in your call history … my get irritated as you may not be able to scroll quick to the alphabet. You’d wish that scrollbar always showed up rather than show up only during scroll.
Typing text
Good experience with virtual qwerty especially in landscape mode. No ITU-T option in portrait. Sometimes difficult to type in portrait mode.
Placing the cursor in between text is really difficult(missed iPhone magnifier)
Loved the predictive text and auto correction features(even though this mistyped my homescreen to on-screen, doesn’t work always:) but overall very useful
Touch and Feel
Good metallic finish and looks very stylish. No cheap plastic anywhere
Hardware keys look a little out of place with rest of the metallic look
Feels good in the hand mostly but if you have dry, rough hand like I do it sometimes feels a little slippery
Usability
Touch responsiveness is just great. Things always followed my finger and never noticed much lag.
Some of the list items seemed to be small. Sometimes tapped on adjacent items when I didn’t mean to. So will be tough for a person with big fingers.
Coverflow usability is modest, no wow here.
Overall performance of applications is great. Launch time for just about anything feels like <500 ms
Kinetic scrolling is good. Overall scrolling experience is comparable(but not as good:) to iPhone.
Navigation from one active app to another is not very intuitive. Liked Nokia long tap on Application view hardware key.
Hardware keys
Takes some time getting used for input mechanism through hardware-software keys.
Hardware key takes me to my homescreen and can get to App screen using a one touch
Redundancies in h/w-s/w inputs sometimes tended to confuse
HomeScreen
Just loved it. Could drag and drop any widget anywhere on screen. Pinch zoom and I can see and select all 7 homescreens.
Animations are awesome.
Good thing is not separate mode for editing. Long tap gets you going in Homescreen editing mode
can customize homescreen for readymade work, play mode. Need to check if this really works.
Messaging
Good experience overall.
All messages come as conversational views, so unless I delete your message sent to me a month ago I am going to have to go through it every time you send me a message
New message notifications are not good, come in the top corner of screen and it’s easy to miss those
Camera and Photos
5MP Is good. Nothing great though in terms of quality of photo, videos, loved the N97 in this regard. Need to be able to have good pics at this price.
Good thing is am able to point and in short time once u are able to locate the camera icon(missed a hardware key launcher for camera). That’s what you really need sometimes rather than a 12 MP camera
Speaker
Is loud and clear.
Yet to test headphone/ music quality, radio
Stability
Really good. Not one crash faced in 1.5 week of usage.
Only one problem I had while configuring my network the screen became blank, but I was able to recover to other applications
Browser
Browser experience is good. Standard stuff from Android- Multi touch support , good gesture handling make browsing a pleasant experience.
No exit button from browser. I have to click back button until I reach first web page and then it exits. That was annoying
Had a good Facebook experience.
Calendar
Battery life
Touchpad
Memory
Display
Not great when I was outdoors in sun. Nokia phones score in this regard
Very good indoors though
3.2-inch capacitive AMOLED display with 320x480 pixel resolution. Worked well for me :)