Undoubtedly, one of the N97’s most touted abilities are widgets, even though they are nothing out of this world, being just another step forward from Active Standby, plus they look very much like Samsung’s very own widgets. Basically, there are several areas on the screen where you can store shortcuts and links to applications and features, or weather forecasts, message notifications, RSS feeds and so on. The widget pool will keep growing and most of them will be available in the commercial version of the phone. The good news about the N97, however, is that it offers very flexible settings for widgets, and its huge display allows the user to put more information onto the home screen.

Another thing of note is that the N97’s prototypes don’t have Active Standby mode, which can make you wonder how far they are willing to go with all this. Widgets will be utilized in Nseries and Eseries smartphones, while “ordinary” S60-powered products, such as the Nokia 5800, will be deprived of this functionality out of the box (but since it’s a separate application, there is a chance they’ll decide to take it to the mass-market).

The phone’s Contacts list now allows you to have Favorite entries, which are marked with a yellow star and located at the top of the list. But more importantly, there is a bunch of new fields available for your contacts, including Skype and Gizmo numbers, Facebook screen name and so on. A separate tab allows you to retrieve contact’s status, call him or send a message. All in all, the N97 sports pretty deep integration with social networks and various instant messengers, which is great news for web addicts. And again, we are yet to see how all these services work – at this moment none of them are operational. But even as it is today, the Nokia N97 does impress, offering its users a very easy and intuitive way to access all accounts and other relevant data right out of the box, without the hassle of running several phonebooks or separate applications.

Much like any other Nseries device, the N97 ships with “Photos” application instead of Gallery – as you can see in our video, it’s pretty speedy among all other things, and allows editing images without having to delve deep into the menus.

Related posts:

1. Handy Taskman for N97
2. N97 widget competition
3. Free navigation with Ovi Maps on N97 Mini
4. Desktop. Laptop. Pocket: Nokia N97
5. Music @ Nokia N97

• Previous Entry: Video : Nokia N97 in action
• Next Entry: Video : In conversation with Nokia Games for N97