Update: According to a reliable source, the N97 NAM is getting a v11 update in the next week. Bug fixes galore, and possibly Netflix streaming in the works. Yep, Netflix streaming. Crazy!

It’s been a week since the N97 arrived at my door, and yet during that time I’ve seen some strange things. And not strange in a good way either. So I’m making my official Nokia N97 bug post here and updating it as I see fit.

The biggest issue right now seems to be with AT&T’s 3G network causing repeated reboots on certain N97s. I don’t know how many N97s are affected by this bug nor why it happens, but I’ve experienced it myself, along with couple of other people on the Nokia Europe discussion boards. Read more about it inside.

The following is my list of N97 problems, bugs, and other irregularities.

Annoying Bugs

- 3G causes the N97 to crash and reboot endlessly. This only seems to happen in certain areas, leading me to believe that the N97 has problems with one of the two 3G bands on AT&T (850 or 1900). Any use of 3G causes endless reboots in any application that uses 3G. Fix: switch your phone to use EDGE, or get a new SIM card from AT&T. More info at [Nokia Support Discussions]

- Unlocking the phone via lock switch will not activate the backlight most of the time. This happens on the first unlock after an idle period – subsequent unlocks will activate the backlight until the phone goes into idle mode again. Seems to be a pretty universal problem. Extremely annoying because I have to hit the unlock switch a minimum of three times, usually more. No fix yet.

Home Screen

- The portrait/landscape wallpaper display is screwy. When you use a standard 300×640 vertical image as your background, it will not display correctly in landscape mode. Basically, instead of rotating the image 90 degrees, the phone will take the middle 300 pixels and make an 640×300 image out of it – meaning you get a nice blown-up image in landscape view. Lovely! Fix: when creating a wallpaper image, use a 640×640 image. See my N97 wallpaper post for more details.

- Hitting certain keyboard keys repeatedly causes the screen to freeze for a lengthy amount of time. Basically, whenever you hit a non-numeric key, the screen clears for a quick second, showing only the background and a broken side menu. Pressing the button repeatedly causes some kind of loop, which lags the phone to all hell. Try it with the Function + top row of keys for a bit ‘o fun.

- Unlocking the phone via slide sometimes shows the message “Use keyguard switch to unlock screen and keys” for 1-2 seconds.

- Unlocking the phone via slide while in landscape mode will sometimes cause the screen to reset to portrait mode for a quick second before reverting to landscape mode.

- The phone can’t be locked or unlocked if the keyboard is open. This comes into play when the backlight bug above is triggered – you can’t just lock and unlock the phone to turn on the backlight.

Browser

- Opening the browser and selecting Options -> Exit while loading up a default page sometimes crashes the application.

Software

- Deleting consecutive emails too quickly in Nokia Messaging using the delete key (with delete confirmation turned off) crashes the program.

- Entering a note with the keyboard in Active Notes is extremely laggy.