Even though it was first announced six months ago, the N97 will still be one of the most impressively specced phones on the market when its released in Australia during July. Alongside the touchscreen and full-QWERTY keyboard, the N97 comes with a decent mix of business and consumer features including HSDPA and Wi-Fi for web browsing, A-GPS, a built-in digital compass and Nokia Maps for navigation, a 3.5mm headphone socket, and 32GB of internal memory plus a microSD card slot to increase this to a possible 48GB.

In line with previous N-series releases, the N97 houses an excellent 5-megapixel camera on the back of the handset, complete with Carl Zeiss optics, auto-focus and dual-LED photolights. In 2009 we’re seeing the megapixel count in camera phones growing with Sony Ericsson about to break new ground with 12.1 megapixels in the upcoming Satio, but for our money Nokia is still producing one of the best camera phone modules available. This camera is lightning fast to fire up and the super-quick shutter helps to eliminate handheld judder and keep the focus nice and sharp. The colour reproduction tends to be a little cold — whites tend towards shades of blue — but overall the pictures we’ve taken have been superb.

Multimedia components and the web browser don’t seem to have improved much since the 5800 XpressMusic, which is a bit of a disappointment. The music and video player are both fine — compatible with a decent range of media file formats — but the browser still needs some attention from the Nokia software boffins. The browser loads page content slowly, and the view is never optimised for the screen — instead we spent the first five or 10 seconds on each new page zooming and panning to get an overview of a site. The N97 ships with Flash Lite 3 installed and by default Flash content is turned on, but we suggest you switch this off to speed up page load times significantly. As with many elements on the N97, the browser is better than previous Nokia releases, but is still lagging behind the current competition.

N97 targets a different market segment than 5800, it has beefier hardware specs and the price is almost double as well. But it is totally worth the money, it is one of the best phone ever.