Remember the Search for N competition from a few weeks back? It was a chance for eight lucky NokNok readers to be the first people in the UK to get their hands on a Nokia N97. The winners received their prized Nokia N97 devices the other week but we’ve been back in touch them to see how they’re getting on with the devices. Join us for some ‘real world‘ reviews of the Nokia N97…

Nokia recently gave us EIGHT Nokia N97 smartphones to give away as apart of their Search for N campaign. The lucky winners received their prizes a couple of weeks back and have been busy getting accustomed to the how the Nokia N97 works, and hopefully how much it’s changed their lives.

Check out our full review of the Nokia N97

We thought it would be good to get back in touch and see how they are finding things. This is a great opportunity to get some feedback from real world users. We asked them what they liked. Loved or hated about the Nokia N97 and got some great feedback.

This week we’ll bring you what the winners have said about the Nokia N97 in their own words. First up we have Miguel dos Santos from Bristol:

‘I initially came upon an odd problem that Vodafone didn’t have the data packet settings for the N97 for me to download to my phone, because they hadn’t receive the protocol’s from Nokia yet apparently or something like that, so I could access the internet, but I sorted that out pretty simply by downloading the N96 settings! But that’s what can expect from having a phone before it’s actually been released.

The Good: It’s really well designed. It’s easy to use, and fit’s well in my hand. I can hold the phone open in one hand and still get to all of the screen and feel like I’m going to drop the phone or anything.

I have finally been re-united with Shozu and Fring, which I used before I got my LG, but then couldn’t install on it, because they weren’t made for LG’s, so I can once more use those application I enjoyed before, which I’m really glad about! All in all, it’s been loads better than my previous phone, which was the LG Renoir (which I only bought because of it’s camera, and as a result got stuck with a phone that was only really good as a camera!

The most notable thing I’ve found with my new phone though, is I find I spend less time in front of the screen on my laptop now that I my phone is that much more capable. It’s really great. I keep up to date with my friends on Facebook more than before, simply because I can check up on it in those spaces of time in my day that I’m free from distractions, like on my bus ride to work and home again, at lunch time (I can go outside and catch up instead of staying cooped up in the office).

The Bad: When I enable live content updating on home screen, the battery drains away pretty quickly. I’ve had to charge my phone every day really. There’s been a few times when there was something I’ve wanted to photograph and upload to flickr, only to find that my battery had died, which was frustrating.

Also the few bugs I found were, When going outside the range of my home wifi network, the phone didn’t automatically switch over the the second priority network, which was my Vodafone GPRS network. I had to go and delete the home network for it to switch over. And the other one was when an application, or the whole phone just froze up, and so I had to switch the phone off and on again, but I think I can chalk that up to trying to do too much stuff too quickly.

With all this said, I know there is still lots of potential in the phone that I’m not even using yet, which I will only properly benefit from later as I use the Nokia N97 more.’

Justin Ellis, Newport, sadly couldn’t join us at the award ceremony, so has only had his Nokia N97 for a few days but managed to pull together a few thoughts for us:

The best bits:

- BBC iPlayer looks fantastic
- YouTube works really well
- touch screen works well
- phone looks amazing!

The bad bits:

- Not getting on well with the keyboard yet ( but I suspect I’ll get better with more practice )
- The OS suffers the same issues as my 5800 (ie. not knowing whether a single or double tap is necessary)

Quick and to the point but it is early days for Justin. We’ll be bringing you more Search for N winners reviews later this week.