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The short answer is yes and no.

The N97 is one heckuva smartphone. It’s a seven-band (HSDPA/EDGE/GPRS/GSM), 3.5G world phone with a good looking 360-by-640 pixel touch screen, an easy-to-use slide-out, QWERTY hardware keyboard, 32 GB of internal storage plus a micro-SD card slot, a 5.0 megapixel camera (video and stills with a Carl Zeiss lens), pretty good sounding stereo speakers, GPS (including Maps with a digital compass), Wi-Fi, Bluetooth (2.0) and a removable, rechargeable battery pack that’s said to be good for as much as 9.5 hours of talk and something like 18 days of standby.

If you look at it from a hardware point of view Nokia’s N97 is an absolutely fantastic smartphone. Best in its class by a wide margin.

But a smartphone is more than the sum of its hardware parts. There are also items like software and even marketing to contend with. This is where the N97 might not measure up to the competition.

Don’t get me wrong – there is really nothing wrong with N97. It’s just that in June, 2009 the handset has to be compared to the competition and that might be a problem for Nokia.

Nokia phones run on the Symbian operating system. Symbian has been around for decades (remember Psion PDAs?) and the software has been tweaked and improved over the years. The OS (version 9.4, Series 60, release 5) is really quite fast and powerful. Unfortunately it’s slightly less intuitive and user-friendly than some of the other smartphones out there. That doesn’t mean any of these phones less smart than the others – just require a tiny bit more user interplay.

For instance, when you install a new mini-application/add-on for Apple’s iPhone or Palm’s Pre you press a button and the software basically does everything for you. When you try that on an Android phone you have to press a few on-screen buttons to get it done. Same for BlackBerries. With the N97 there are even more buttons to press. Difficult? No. More than the competition? Yes. In the end, everything works perfectly, though.

Ultimately, all these devices do the same basic tasks – it’s just how easy they make it for us end users that set them apart. (That, the actual hardware and probably the app store. Nokia’s OVI store looks very promising.)

The big problem for Nokia is that there’s no cell phone provider to sell the N97 here in the United States. Since it’s a GSM phone it can only be sold by T-Mobile or AT&T. T-Mobile’s 3G network works on different frequencies than AT&T’s so, right now, the N97 will only do 3G/3.5G on AT&T. And we all know that AT&T sells the iPhone.

No carrier means no subsidies to offset a handset’s actual high price. So, since the N97 can only be purchased (so far) unlocked on Nokia’s Website – the asking price is $699. I agree – that’s just not going to fly in a world of $99 iPhones.

Nokia’s N97 is a great smartphone – one of many great smartphones on the market today. They all have quirks. Wich one you’ll like the best probably comes down to a matter of taste. I’m pretty sure that in other countries – with the proper subsidies – the N97 will be a great success. Maybe AT&T (or T-Mobile) will relent and give more of us a chance to see what goodies Nokia has crammed into their nifty little device.