The mobile market, particularly the smartphone market is heating up as mobile web usage and data plan usage both reach towards the skies. With the increase of mobile web usage comes a need for more powerful devices that can take advantage of everything the web has to offer as well as slowly replacing our time spend at typical desktop or laptop computers and instead investing that time into our mobiles. One of the biggest parts of the whole *productive* mobile usage is the processor. A smartphone can live or die by how fast its little silicon heart pumps. In the case of Nokia’s much hyped touchscreen + qwerty keyboard combo, one would think that it would be powered by a 600+MHz CPU (as in Nokia’s own Xpress Music 5630) in order to make the most of you mobile time. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. Now second to the processor is the GPU or RAM that is included. The more GPU or RAM, the more graphically intense applications and games will be and the smoother they will run. Again, in the case of the N97, it is sorely lacking. The cause? Blame it on the use of the ARM11 434MHz processor and paltry 128MB of RAM. One would think that Nokia, a once (and still more or less) mobile giant who is steadily losing market share would maket he N97 all that it could be and really blow peoples’ doors off. Instead, it appears they went down the road of “just OK” and took a turn at adequate. Nokia claims to be “refining” the OS drastically as to make system based tasks effortless and smooth. However, CPU/GPU intensive tasks such as games, graphically rich websites, and other multimedia content could take its toll on the weak in the knees processor. Maybe they’ll up the ante on the N97′s sucessor. We can only hope.

Source: Slashgear, Symbian-Freak