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Larry Bird and Magic Johnson is the best comparison I can think of when thinking about the newly announced flagship Nokia N97 and the venerable rockstar of the handheld market; Apple’s iPhone.  Now I’m not saying the two are mortal enemies or that they are even direct competitors in the market (though they very well might be), but I’m just saying that the comparison between the two is inevitable.  That being said, the reason I picked Bird and Magic as the analogy is because they were two of the best players in the game (basketball for those non-NBA junkies) and were constantly battleing one another and of course constantly being compared to one another as well.  The only problem was comparing the two was like comparing apples to oranges, primarily because both played a very different style of game.  Magic was best known for his passing, and Bird was known for his sweet shot.  So you see, like these two all-time greats, the comparisons are going to be inevitable, so we might as well do our own right here.

Nokia’s N97 is a beautifully designed, touchscreen smartphone with a sliding keyboard.  Some other geek-tastic features include 3G connectivity, 32GB of onboard memory, a 5MP camera and upto 320 minutes of talk time.  Oh and it has a removal battery, copy/paste and MMS, not that anyone wants those or anything *cough*APPLE*cough*.  Nokia is marketing their new flagship as a mobile computer rather then simply as just another smartphone, which is a clever way to say “we’re not competing with Apple because our product is way more then just a ‘phone’.”

It is evident that the N97 was built with social networking sites in mind, as they are prominitely featured on the device’s screen in release photos, and even mentioned in the press release “…friends, social networks and news are available by simply touching the home screen. The 16:9 widescreen display can be fully personalized with frequently updated widgets of favorite web services and social networking sites.” Oh and did we mention it has a 16:9 3.5″ display with a 640×360 pixel resolution (iPhone has the same 3.5″ screen size but only 480×320 pixels).  Though I’m not completely sold on these tilting-to-reveal-a-keyboard devices, I must say that this thing looks like it might pull it off.

Anyway, getting back to the inevitable comparison.  So why do I think that the two devices (iPhone & N97) SHOULD NOT be compared?  Well it’s easy, just take a look at who each is targetting.  Granted there’s a good amount of overlapping in demographic between the two as the N97 aims to go after the social networking crowd and the iPhone has fun games/applications, Apple’s strategy is to overtake the smartphone as a whole, not just the younger demographic.  This can be seen in their enterprise-friendly feature rollout in the 2.0 ugprade of the iPhone.  While it is too soon to tell if N97 will take a similar approach, it’s safe to say that enterprise is not a focus on the new device.

It’s pretty clear to see that while the two devices will be compared to death by media far and wide, it’s pretty clear from the information provided by Nokia today that the N97 is going for a different approach then the iPhone.