Here’s one final souvenir from last month’s trip around the world — three once-in-a-lifetime photo opps as seen through the mighty lens of Nokia’s N86…

Wat Pho, Bangkok.

Taipei 101, Taipei.

Shibuya Crossing, Tokyo.

As you can see via the reflection in the pic directly above, all three photos were captured with an N79 — a fine camera phone in its own right…

Thanks once again to Tom and WOM World for entrusting me with an N86. And to my loyal readers, first-time visitors, even comment spammers, I hope you have a safe and happy holiday close to the people you care about. For yours truly, some exciting things are afoot in 2010… Stay tuned!

One question everybody kept asking me about the N97 24/Tour I went on last summer was:

“Are they gonna let you keep the phone?”

Maybe because I had two of them, the answer seemed to be no — that is until yesterday, when I read this blog post from the good folks at Qik:

Thanks to our partner, Nokia, we had launched a contest to give away 5 Nokia N97s to Qikkers for sharing their experience and tagging them with #N97contest for the past month. Well, we had a whopping 688 entries during the month from all over the world and would like to thank everyone who participated in this.

So, the 5 lucky winners of the Nokia N97 are…..drumroll………..

#4 Andrew Currie from Canada

Wait, what? Zomg!!1!

The timing couldn’t have been better, as I’m currently in the market for a new Nokia anyway. In fact, due to the realization that the N97′s front-facing camera shoots at a higher resolution than other Nseries models, it was back in the running against newer, supposedly better handsets.

I thought it appropriate to stream a press conference acceptance speech apology video when I heard the news. Here it is:

I take delivery of my N97 sometime in January. Not sure if it’s going to be a white one or not, but I’m crossing my fingers. Either way it’ll be a great souvenir of every tech blogger’s dream come true!

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One thing that stuck with me from the launch of WIND Mobile in Toronto this past week was that the company offers not a single straight-up oldskool handset. Even in their currently limited lineup everything they’re selling is either a touchscreen or qwerty.

And yet my recent stopover in super-futuristic Tokyo last month would suggest that numberpad devices are still very much in fashion.

Suffice to say that for me and this N86, traditional T9 text input is something that has to be tolerated for the sake of that sweet, sweet camera.

The keypad on the N86 isn’t bad, per se — far from it. While maybe not quite up to the gold standard of numberpads — that honour goes to the N95, IMHO — the keys on the N86 have similarly good travel and, critically, have a bit of space between them, as you can see here:

If you’re a whiz at T9 your thumbs will fly on the N86, but if you’re still learning like me you just need a little patience and you’ll get bw bz by.

Above the keys is a straight-up oldskool 240×320-pixel display, with one important difference. Though the resolution is the same as on almost every other Eseries and Nseries device, this one is all AMOLED up in yo’ face! That is to say, it’s an active-matrix organic light-emitting diode display…

So what? Well, see for yourself, the N86 on the left compared to my N79 on the right:

AMOLED is more efficient for better battery life, but more importantly it looks fantastic everywhere except in direct sunlight, where it’s still readable.

But behind the screen we’ve got a bit of an oldskool problem — a lack of available space for installed apps.

Here’s most of what I’ve put on my N86, plus a handy guide in case there’s something here that you don’t recognize:

Row 1: Calcium, FishText, Frozen Bubble.
Row 2: JoikuSpot, Nimbuzz, OfficeSuite.
Row 3: Opera Mini, Qik, SplashID.
Row 4: SymTorrent, UpCode, WorldMate.

None of these apps take up much space on their own, but together with the other necessary items on my default drive they’ve gobbled up over 70 of the available 78MB of flash memory there.

Don’t believe me? See for yourself…

Part of the problem is how Nokia arbitrarily splits up the internal memory on its devices into separate virtual drives. Sure, I could’ve install all my apps and more into the “mass memory” partition of the single, internal drive, but I didn’t — and now I can’t install the N-Gage client on my N86 at all.

Furthermore, why split it all up in the first place? That’s straight-up oldskool obfuscation for new users, yo… But I suppose it makes sense in this (mostly) straight-up oldskool Nokia.

If I do end up buying an N86 for myself, I’m gonna have to get me some adidas-style white stripes to lay across the back of it.

Word.

Hey, didn’t I post just yesterday that Nokia’s N86 was the best camera phone EVAR?

Indeed I did. I’m not trying to contradict myself here; instead I merely wish to point out a couple of issues that prospective N86 owners should be aware of. You can decide for yourself how important they are.

Exhibit A: Panora-meh.

Maybe it’s because photo-stitching is a bad idea with a wide-angle lens, or maybe it’s because I suck at such things. But try as I might I could not for the life of me get a halfway decent result in the N86′s panorama mode.

Click through to each photo’s Flickr page and see what went wrong with each. The third photo came closest to yielding acceptable results, but there are errors in all three…

Exhibit B: (not so much) Macro.

I’m not terribly impressed by the macro mode on the N86 (or any of the Nseries handsets I’ve tried, for that matter). I just can’t get as close to what I’m shooting as I’d like to, like this big bag of betel nuts in Taipei, for example:

The odd thing is that while focusing the lens will often lock on my subject for a split-second, then lose it completely. Maybe this hack for macro video recording would also work in photo mode?

Exhibit C: Here we go again…

N97 owners are all too familiar with Nokia’s destructive camera lens cover. Well, guess what — the cover on this N86 is doing the same thing. See that line just below the lens?

The saving grace here is that the cover is not scratching the glass directly over the lens, per se, due to its modified design. But Nokia could have avoided this uproar altogether with more metal painted plastic around the lens, as they did with their own N79:

I’m not personally sold on the lens cover idea at all, and my opinion is that a thick, clear shield over the lens (as in the N95 8GB and N97 Mini) is the way to go.

And on the subject of cameras…

Exhibit D: Front-facing camera… WTF?!1!

Imagine my surprise to discover that the front-facing camera on Nokia’s imaging flagship has a lower resolution than the N97 before it — CIF vs. VGA. The pixel count isn’t much different but the resulting video sure is!

Here are two streamed Qik videos, recorded in the same location at the same time of day with the same settings. The only difference between the two is the slightly weaker Canadian winter sun.

N86 (352×288 pixels), recorded yesterday:

N97 (640×480 pixels) recorded last summer::

While the front-facing camera might never be used on most handsets, I’m a big of Qik and use it quite often with my screen facing me. Maybe this is why Qik’s running a contest right now with the 1st-gen N97 as the prize?

So there they are, my photo and video-related issues with the N86. Are they enough to steer you towards another device? It’s certainly giving me pause for thought…

How’s this for a vote of confidence? The 8-megapixel camera on Nokia’s N86 is so good that I never once reached for a standalone camera on my recent trip around the world.

Here are some of the best pics snapped in faraway places — you can see more in my dedicated Flickr set…

And video is every bit as impressive on this thing, maybe even more so:

Even video streamed live to Qik at dusk looks crisp and clear — and with the powerful one-two punch of PixelPipe and Share Online I can upload any media anywhere in just a few clicks.

If there’s a better camera phone out there I sure haven’t seen it…