I thought their complaints were pretty lame in general.
1. The screen suffers from glare?! All mobile phones do, and Engadget even said this. The N97 may be "particular attractor". What does "might be" mean? They had one in their hands, tested it, and don't say that it definitely is or is not a "glare attractor". Just that it might be. Either I'm reading this wrong or their complaint is based on a guess. A maybe. This point seems a bit wishy-washy to me.
2. They don't like the resistive touch screen technology, and that's a subjective judgement. I understand if they don't like it, no problem. I'll give them that point. I'm not a fan of the touch screen on the Blackberry Storm, so if the N97 screen utilizes the same hepatic feedback system I may not like it either.
3. They didn't like the "barely pocketable" size either. Hey, I'm a fan of the E90 so the N97's size isn't going to scare me! I welcome the size because it means a big, beautiful and customizable screen.
4. What really kills me about their review is that they think S60 is "dated". Hell, that's a major selling point of the N97 for me! Put Windows Mobile on it and I'm out.
5. They also seemed to think the OS was sluggish. They did say that it was a pre-release unit, basically beta software, blah blah blah, but that Nokia has a history of sluggish software not being rectified by final release. I find S60 in the new generation of Nokias to be very good, somewhere between WM (God-awful) and Blackberry (?ber-responsive) for snappiness?. What little lag I find on my N95-4 is totally within acceptable limits for any phone. Now, my old E61i was a tragedy as far as lag in the OS. But the newer Nokias have much better processors and the newer firmware versions seem more streamlined.