Clawg Blog

After some consideration I bought the Nokia 97 last week over a few other phones I was looking at. My decision was based on the camera and FM radio that I felt gave it the edge over the iphone + I am would not be tied to a 2 year contract as I could get the N97 on a 12 month deal.

Unfortunately since the phone arrived I have had nothing but hassle. It is the most user “unfriendly” phone to set up if you are a mac user. I have an ipod touch and friends have the iphone so when my N97 arrived I expected it to be pretty much the same as the iphone/itouch, I would turn it on and everything would just – well WORK. I could not have been further from the truth and have spent endless hours trying to get things syncd up and transfered over from my mac to the phone. So I thought it only fair I share my experience in the hope it may save someone a few hours of there life.

Syncing contacts and calendar – isync is not available for the n97, so you need to do this through google mail. To do this you must firstly remove ovi contacts from you phone as there is some sort of conflict going on, once you have done this it should be fine and the phone should start cooperating. I used mail exchange, which you need to download from the Nokia site. I am a vodafone customer and mail exchange is meant to come pre-installed, but trust me its not. Stick in all your gmail account details and you should be all synced up.

Photos – I had loads of photos on my previous phone and my mac that I wanted to transfer over to the phone and use as contact images or simply just have them available to look through. If you want to do this on the mac your best bet is to transfer them over using mass storage mode when the USB is plugged in and just drag and drop all your images from the mac to the phone. My woes did not there though, the images didn’t appear in the photo browser so I had to (whilst in the mass storage file browser mode on the mac) was change the name of the folder private/101ffc31 to private/101ffc31.old and hey presto the thumbnails of my images appeared instead of a broken image symbol and I could access all my image. PS. They will all be in the download folder.

Music- Music can be dragged and dropped in mass storage mode like the images. Just drop them into a music folder. I didn’t have this folder so I just created one. Once this is done you need to go into the music app and select options/refresh library for the music you added to appear as a choice in the music player.

Thats been my biggest gripes with the N97, its a difficult learning process but I feel I am almost there and starting to enjoy the phone and its facilities. There are promises of a firmware update coming out soon, if you are a vodafone customer like me you may be waiting a while until Version 12 (whatever) has been released, if you are not a vodafone customer there is a good chance the update is already available. Looking into the future there is also a major update coming which offers some really neat extra features but unless you brick your phone you may have a while to wait just like me.

Hope that helps someone out there.