Nokia concedes the N97 seriously missed the mark

A senior Nokia official has admitted that its N97 flagship smartphone ended up being a "tremendous disappointment".

After the success experienced by the previous-generation N95 and N96, Nokia had high hopes for the N97 when it launched last summer, especially as it was Nokia's first touchscreen N-series handset.

However, Anssi Vanjoki, the company's executive vice president of markets, has conceded that the end result left a lot to be desired. In a video interview with All About Symbian, Vanjoki said while the N97 was a success in terms of sales, "it has been a tremendous disappointment in terms of the experience quality for the consumers".

Vanjoki admitted that Nokia hadn't expected such a negative reaction. And while the N97's performance was improved significantly by the release of version 20 and 21 of the N97 firmware, by then the damage had largely been done. "It has been an unbelievable cycle of things for us," Vanjoki said, "that has taken far too long to repair and mitigate".

Delays seem to have been the N97's nemesis almost since its existence first came to light. It was first announced in December 2008, with Nokia proudly proclaiming its touch screen interface as a significant step forward for its Symbian operating system.

But despite making fleeting appearances at trade events and being the subject of much speculation in the first half of 2009, it was June before the N97 was finally launched, by which time the Symbian^1 OS foundation was already showing its age.

"We stretched for too long, something which should not have been stretched," Vanjoki admitted.

He did, however, insist that Nokia had learned from the experience, and promised that the significant new Symbian^3 platform which has switched to an open source model would be much better: "we have taken the learnings and when Symbian^3 comes out you can rest assured it will be perfect," he said.