At Nokia World last October, Nokia proudly beamed that the N97 would ‘transform the way people connect to the Internet and to each other’.

An ambitious spin-laden statement but one that has some substance.

All this attention has all been garnered by the n97’s very different home screen.

The N97’s homepage features a drag and drop system that lets you customise the widgets you want to display; it has room for up to 6 which then act as jumping off points for their associated tasks.

No big deal I hear you say. Widgets on a homepage? Nonsense, they’ve been around for a while;  typical smartphone fodder.

Because of the drag and drop system the widgets can be effectively floated on the screen until you want to replace them with something a bit more interesting.

At the Mobile World Conference the N97 had been demoed with pre-loaded social media platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace), giving it the appearance of an iGoogle homepage. The phone’s Facebook widget also seamlessly links with the phone’s integrated camera to make it really, really quick to upload photos.

On existing Nokia phones, the customisable home screen (Active Idle/Standby) is a closed system (the preserve of Nokia plug-ins, such as search, email, music, Share online, and so on), but with the N97 this space will be much more open to third parties.

So for the future?

Measuring the success of the N97 open homepage will be a game of wait and see; dependent on which widgets ship with the device, operators and the different marketing campaigns and, of course, the role the Ovi Store will take in it all.

Filed under: N97 News, Ovi, applications, handset news, industry news, themes