All this bickering back and fourth is pretty comical. There seem to be a number of bitter people that have been burned by their previous buying experiences. You people have to know that your schizophrenic buying habits make little difference to the bottom line of a manufacturer like Nokia. So all the people that feel Nokia snubbed you by making four versions of the N95 (and you buying all four versions) need to sit down and relax.
The argument that Nokia isn't improving their feature set starting to border on the absurd. A little more than a year ago Nokia was giving us the N95-4 and the starting price on their web site? $799! Yes I know it was based on a previously designed and released phone but this is what it was and when it was released and many bought it.
Let's see what's increased in a year:
Increased resolution from 240x320 to 360x640
Increased screen size from 2.8" to 3.5"
Touch screen
Increased storage from 8GB (no expansion) to 32GB plus microSD slot
USB 2.0 connectivity
Improved build quality (huge complaint for N-series)
Moving from S60v3 FP1 to S60v5 with FP2 benefits
Customizable home screen (large complaint of N95)
Near simultaneous release (N95-4 lagged N95-2 release by 6 months)
More than 100MHz processor speed
Hardware QWERTY keyboard
Increased battery performance and music playback time drastically
FOTA
ASR (yes ASR finally came to N95-2 but not the N95-4 unless you were able to get v31 before Nokia pulled it down.)
Digital compass
Updated email client
These are all welcome improvements to the N95-4 that I have now. I paid $600 for it in April of 2008 so that means that I expect the N97 to be around $500 shipped by September which will be a decent price and will easily replace my N95-4. If I get it. I'm likely going to wait to see if Nokia releases an E-series device since I am drawn to the messaging capability of that series so much more than N-series.
Now we just need the phone to start shipping so we can start getting first hand user experiences back to see how it really performs. For all the power the OmniaHD is packing the phone doesn't seem as speedy as many were expecting. Wouldn't that be ironic if the N97 was just as responsive? We'll see. Just not soon enough.
