Unless you have been living in a cave for the last year, you should know about the Nokia N97. It had a slide out QWERTY keyboard and a 3.5” resistive touch screen. Sadly although on paper this phone sounded like a true iPhone beater, in practice users found the experience frustrating with many users finding the GPS failing to work, phone freezes and all round bad experiences. The Nokia N97 mini is essentially the same phone, albeit slightly smaller and hopes to fix many of the bugs that plagued the original Nokia N97.
Nokia N97 Mini
The main differences between the Nokia N97 ‘big’ and the Nokia N97 mini are that the mini is more compact, weighs 12g less, and has a smaller display (3.2” vs 3.5”) but the same resolution of 640 x 360 which is better than the iPhone and seems to be a trend with Nokia’s touch screen phones. Other differences are very negligible and as such we will not cover them.
Nokia N97 Mini
The highlight of the N97 series is of course the slide out QWERTY keyboard. In our tests we found the QWERTY keyboard had good feedback levels that will help you bash out that text or email that bit faster. The 3 row keyboard was a bit of a setback though and meant that almost all the keys were ‘doubly used’ which means simply that each key had both a letter and a symbol. This made the keyboard feel slightly cramped compared to the larger Nokia N97. The Space key has been moved closer to the middle which is beneficial as the Space key is most likely the most used key on the keyboard.
Front View of Nokia N97 Mini
Battery life was acceptable too with us having to charge it after 36 hours of heavy use. When used normally it should last roughly 3 days without charging. Of course if you need more battery life, you could buy another battery to double the battery life which could be handy when going somewhere with no power.
The interface is identical to the Nokia N97 as they both run the same operating system. 4 themes were preloaded and all of them looked nice. And of course if you want more themes a quick Google search will bring up some sites.
Ovi-Mail is included and we found it to be a very nice email client. You can have multiple email accounts. To get started, if you use a webmail service you can simply enter your username and password, provided it is part of the 1000+ supported email services. You can set it to check every X amount of hours/days/months or set it to download new emails next time an internet connection is available. You can configure it to download emails only when you have a WLAN connection that could save you a lot of money in data charges if you don’t have a data plan.
One of the great benefits of owning a Nokia phone is the free GPS navigation, Ovi Maps. You get turn by turn directions and maps for the entire world. With the GPS-enabled Nokia N97 mini, we found that a cold start without A-GPS support took almost 10 minutes to get a satellite lock. With A-GPS enabled you can expect quicker satellite locking. After we were ‘locked’ however the unit impressed us with its accuracy and we could easily replace our TomTom with this device.
Nokia N97 Mini
In conclusion, we are impressed with the Nokia N97 mini, and considering it is priced at around £25 a month, you get a lot for your money. If you text or email a lot then the slide out QWERTY keyboard is a serious benefit. The ‘mini’ size is not a bad thing and the phone isn’t very small, rather what the Nokia N97 should have been in the first place. All in all this phone is worth serious consideration by anybody.
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Very informative post. Nokia N97 Mini looks best in terms of design.