Nokia N97 vs Sony Ericsson Idou – Let the battle begin
The Nokia N97 is the latest touchscreen smartphone in the Nokia portfolio. It finds a capable competitor in the Sony Ericsson IDOU (pronounced I do), the manufacturers’ fancy presentation.
Design
The Nokia N97 has vital stats of 117.2mm x 55.2mm x 15.9mm and is slightly larger than the Sony IDOU which is 111mm x 54mm x 15mm in size. Both phones feel great in the hand and the Idou feels bulky too. The 3.5-inch, 360X640-pixel resolution touchscreen on the N97 is matched with a similarly sized touchscreen on the Sony Idou. However, the Nokia has an ergonomically designed slide-out QWERTY keyboard with evenly spaced keys, plus touch input setup. This is a boon for less nimble fingers. The Sony Ericsson phone does not offer such an attribute.
Software
The Nokia N97 is an Android smartphone using Symbion 60 software while the Idou uses Symbion60 as its software platform with a user interface that is very different from the Nokia S60 user interface. The N97’s interface is very responsive to touch and the Sony Ericsson does an equally good job of touch sensitivity as well.
Facets and performance
The N97 is an attempt to bridge the seam between laptop and smartphone. Its top Internet browser is the same as the one used on a full PC. 3G HSDPA connectivity allows fast downloading of web pages to the mobile. Nokia supports seamless social networking by integrating with apps like Face Book and My Space. Sony’s IDOU has the usual browser found on high-end smartphones, but supports other features like HSDPA. Both phones have Wi Fi and Blue Tooth connectivity.
The Nokia N97 has only a 5 Mega pixel Carl Zeiss optical lens camera which is carried away by the prodigious 12 Mega pixel camera of the Idou, the camera is also superior as it has a xenon flash and an LED flash in contrast to the Nokia N97 Camera which only has dual LED flash.
Both phones have secondary VGA video call cameras. N97 can play flash files and flash based videos like YouTube videos. Your video capture is DVD quality and the phone supports uploading videos to the Internet. The video quality of the Sony Ericsson IDOU can be considered on a par with that of the N97.
The Nokia phone has a 3.5mm audio jack for headphones which the Idou lacks. The N97 offers stellar performance with its incredible 32 GB memory that can be expanded by 16 GB with the micro SD card slot. The Sony Ericsson uses an M2 memory card for expansion, but its memory capacity has not yet been decided.
The Nokia N97 is packed with Nokia Maps to give you quick access to national and local maps. Sony’s IDOU, on the other hand, uses Google’s maps application to aid navigation.
Both the N97 and the Sony Ericsson IDOU are equally functional and a delight for tech-savvy customers.
