N97 Debrief: Against the iPhone

Look, let’s stop beating around the bush with this… It should be fairly obvious from the photo above who Nokia’s after with their flagship N97. It also can’t be denied that in North America, at least, Apple’s iPhone is everywhere.

My goal with this post is to highlight the key differences between the two and let you draw your own conclusions. Along the way, I’ll be pointing out what Nokia could have done (and can still do) better.

No more Apple Kool-Aid, thanks… I’m done.

As soon as Apple’s WWDC keynote wrapped up yesterday I started thinking about what I would write here.

Requiem for a MacBook

Last night I handed over my 2007-vintage BlackBook to my sister in law, whose IBM ThinkPad has been compromised — most probably by her kids clicking on banner ads.

Though this is the last version of Apple’s consumer portable to have FireWire (and target disk mode) built-in, it has become too cumbersome for me to cart around and has been replaced by a diminutive Asus Eee PC running Linux.

What I’ll miss:

• That it was generally a stable product, probably because I kept OS X Tiger on it and never went near Leoptard.
• (oddly enough) iSync – though not unique to this particular machine, I did store all my PIM data here. I’ve since moved on to a “cloud-based” PIM 2.0 app, but through all my trials of Nokia smartphones iSync never let me down.
  

And not so much:

• The heft – in this day and age, this thing was just too big to carry around comfortably. That fugly briefcase I had didn’t help much either.
• The glossy screen – it looked great in the store and terrible everywhere else.
• The fan – it seemed to kick in at full blast for no apparent reason and was annoyingly loud when it did.
• Paying an extra $200 CAD to get it in black. That was dumb.