After my initial fascination with the hardware, it was time to delve deeper and this time I’ll be looking into the user interface. While it runs on the same Symbian S60 fifth edition platform, Nokia has added a new homescreen that supports real-time widgets. There have been few other tweaks here and there (which will also reveal the secret behind the picture I have used with this post.

The home screen is one of the most informative that we have ever come across in a smartphone. The N97 supports widgets that update continuously and keep you up to date with your social networks, news or weather updates. At the moment, you can choose from online widgets like Accuweather, Amazon, Bloomberg, Hi5 and Facebook apart from having your e-mail, five favourite contacts and frequently used apps. You can have any five from these options on your homescreen. Nokia will also have some more widgets in the coming days. Mind you, it is ideal to have an all-you-can-eat data plan if you are thinking of having online widgets on the homescreen.

While widgets on the homescreen is good, the phone-part of the interface is puzzling. The N97 has dedicated send and end keys below the display but at times when you receive a call it asks you to slide your finger on a portion of the screen to accept or reject calls. At those times, the send and end keys do not work! I figured out that this happens if you get a call when the screen is locked, which means that the screen lock also locks the send/end keys and hence these do not work. However, if you get a call when the screen is unlocked, these work perfectly. This makes a simple task like attending calls complicated as you have to first see if you can attend it by pressing the key or you’d have to slide your finger on the screen. C’mon guys, either don’t have dedicated keys and just have an onscreen input or if you have those keys let them do their work. I’d be surprised if Nokia does not fix it in its next firmware upgrade for the N97.

Talking about the firmware upgrade, Nokia had issued one on July 1, which I have installed on my device. It reduces the time it took for the screen to change its orientation from landscape to portrait and also adds a dedicated Ovi Store menu item (wasn’t the N97 supposed to be the first device to come pre-embedded with the Ovi Store?). It also reduces the frequency of the phone’s tendency to hang but it does not eliminate it completely. Today, I ended up restarting my N97 thrice.

Well, that is it for today and next time I’d be talking some more about its ‘unusual’ QWERTY keyboard as well as some more about its user interface.

And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter! @Cellpassion where we will be tweeting our  musings about the N97.