A meeting with Axel Meyer and the N97s

On the 10th of June I along with a select few were invited to the N97 Blogger Meet at the Trident – Gurgaon. This event was to basically showcase the N97 to a select few and have have Axel Meyer explain what made the N97 so different from the remaining Nseries phones so far. Mr. Axel Meyer is currently the Global Design Head for Nokia’s Nseries. He has been instrumental in designing the N97.

The event started with Axel talking about the inspiration behind the N97. He went to great lengths to explain how digital and physical aspects of our lives come together through this device.  According to Axel, the design of the N97 tries to connect your past, present and future in such a way that it becomes possible for you share your memories, stories and your life even with people who are important to you. Axel also stated that one of the most important challenges for the design team was to allow access to everything in a simple manner and also share it in real time. For the design team, the design of the N97 had to begin with people and had to have relevance. The people who did get to try out the handset in the early stages, loved it for what it could do. The device allowed them connect to people, discover things, redefine their future and most of all allowed them to share photos, videos, memories, stories and their life also.

The N97 has had people from all over the world collaborating in its creation. This dispels any thoughts one would have of how Nokia phones are designed. We can be sure that it is not done in a single room, instead it is a global collaboration. The N97 is a step in the direction of making the device, personal. The device’s design is all about freeing you from using it in a fixed way, so you can do what you want, how you want.

The 48 gigabytes of space on the phone allows the user to store 100s of full length movies, 1000s of photos and songs, and loads of information. It allows you to preserve the memories of where have you been, where you are right now and where will you go from here.

Content creation – Movies and photographs was another area that Axel highlighted in his presentation, he mentioned quite a many baffling statistics, let me rattle them off, this will probably help in understanding the reasons for making the N97 a content creating device.

1. By 2012, more than 25% of the content generated will come from people who are not a part of media groups.

2. 1.9 billion people are uploading photos on Facebook.

3. 2.4 billion people have been ‘tagged’ in these photos.

These kind of numbers show that the N97 will allow a user to create and share content almost instantaneously from one device. The 5MP camera with dual LED flash will enable people to take videos in low light and share it on Facebook or Ovi or Flickr perhaps. As Axel rightly pointed out that, “the media is and will always remain social”.

The N97 is truly a device that is for you, designed by you.

Axel also added that the N97 was but only the beginning of what is to come. He clearly said that there will be many more devices following the the principles and footsteps of the N97.

What followed after this was a round of Q&A, where people asked a lot of questions about the device being a gaming device, possible future colour options, hardware of the N97 and how competing players will change the way of the future and current devices. There were even questions pertaining to the environment, and also of how devices like the E71 and 5800 have played a role in the development of the N97.

In between all of this my friend, Vaibhav Sharma and I managed to get some exclusive photographs and at the same time we even managed a play with the device a bit. But that requires another post.

So here are some photos of the N97!

Oh and just in case you wanted to know which colour Axel was using, it was White. Personally it is the black which I loved a lot.

On behalf of everyone at Symbian-Life Blog, I would like to thank everyone at Blogger’s Mind, Nokia India and everybody else involved for putting up such a splendid show. I hope events like these are just a beginning of this initiative started by Nokia India. We bloggers welcome this and wish Nokia all the best!