Nokia N97 Mini Mobile Phone Review - A Middle-Weight Symbian Touchscreen

Following on from the high end N97 announced earlier, Nokia have produced the N97 Mini - a smaller, lighter version of the N97 with less internal memory, smaller display and battery, at a not-much-smaller price. Nokia appears to be focusing on optimisation with this series of phones rather than announcing new features.

As with all things, the relationship between price and capability has not been evenly applied since the phones were not announced together, leaving the N97 Mini dangling in the air when it comes to what it offers.

Despite this - it is a nice little quad-band GSM and tri-band 3G phone with 3.6Mbps HSDPA support - much less bulky than the N97, and with many features packed into its little can.

Measuring in at 113 x 52.5 x 14.2mm, it doesn't seem to be that much different until you compare the physical volume of the two phones. 75cc for the N97 Mini and 88cc for the N97 but only 12% difference in the weight. In terms of QWERTY side-slider smartphones, the Nokia N97 Mini competes well when it comes to size. It is beaten by the E75 which misses many of its functions.

The N97 Mini offers a Slide-n-tilt 3.2 inch 16m colour resistive touchscreen display with a resolution of 640 x 360 pixels, driven by the Symbian OS 9.4 - S60 (5th edition with kinetic scrolling) User Interface. Compared to the N97 - the display is of equal quality, only smaller, and the responsiveness of the resistive screen is improved in this model. It allows the use of stylus and will respond to pressure from a gloved hand. It has a proximity sensor and auto-rotate as well as handwriting recognition.

The keyboard is a slide-out three row full QWERTY, but, presumably to save space, the D-pad found in the N97 is missing.

For recording special places or occasions, the 5 megapixel autofocus camera (now without the lens cover) features Carl Zeiss optics, Geo-tagging, has a dual LED flash and can record VGA video at 30fps aided by a video light. There is also a secondary camera (VGA15fps).

Driven by an ARM 11 434MHz CPU, the Nokia N97 Mini has 128MB of RAM and 8GB onboard storage, which can be increased up to 16GB by means of the microSDHC supporting microSD card slot. It supports Wi-Fi and GPS with A-GPS, has a digital compass, built in accelerometer, FM Radio (no transmitter) with RDS and a 3.5mm audio jack and TV-out with nice audio reproduction. It also supports Stereo Bluetooth v2.0.

Although the web browser has full Flash and Java support, there is no document editing capability without a paid upgrade, no DivX or XviD video support out-of-the-box and the handset does not support smart dialling. The S60 touch screen user interface is still a tad inconsistent and you have to swap between the handsfree plug in and the headset.

On the plus side, the Nokia N97 Mini is less plasticky and more fingerprint-resistant than it's bigger brother and the battery cover has been replaced with metal.