Today I found on the Nokia Blog a post that mentions the meeting in NYC that Nokia Users had on January 23rd. They were lucky enough to have a Nokia representative with them, he took a prototype N97 to the meetup and they were able to play with it for a few minutes. You can watch one of the videos below.

As you can see, the slide mechanism works nicely, it looks smooth and with a good build-quality.

The keyboard was also analysed and they mention that it is confortable, has good spacing between keys and feels good. Below is a picture of the keyboard.

Finally, the User Interface is also mentioned, let’s not forget that this device runs on S60 5th edition and has a lot of improvements over 3rd edition.