Nokia N97 Mini Mobile Phones & Features

Features :

3.2-inch touch screen, 8GB storage, 5MP camera, S60 5th edition, microSD, 3.5mm jack, 3G, GPRS, GPS, GSM, HSDPA, Bluetooth, Li-Ion battery

The Nokia N97 Mini comes on the coattails of the Nokia N97, a handset that was announced at Nokia World in late 2008. The original Nokia N97 mobile phone took over six months to appear in the shops, apparently due to ironing out feature interoperability issues.

The wait for the Nokia N97 Mini shouldn't be as long. The mobile was announced earlier in September at Nokia World - where we managed to have a quick hands on with it - and is due to hit the shelves this holiday buying season.

Nokia's N97 Mini is altogether a rather deceiving product name by the Finnish phone makers as it's not really a miniature version of the Nokia N97 whatsoever. In fact it's more or less a copy of the original Nokia N97 handset, only with a more sensible storage capacity that should really have appeared in the first iteration.

When it was announced at Nokia World last year, the Nokia N97 came with the largest amount of onboard memory in a phone at that point at a whopping 32GB, with a further possible 16GB in the form of a microSD card. The largest internal memory seen in a Nokia handset prior to that time was just 8GB with the N95 and N96, which made the N97's large memory a big leap for the firm.

Both handsets have the same QVGA resolution of 640x360 on their touch screens, although the N97 Mini supports a 3.2-inch display with the N97 measuring in at 3.5 inches but the difference is hardly noticeable. The Mini's size is just four millimetres shorter than its previous counterpart at 113mm, three millimetres less in width at 52.5mm and under a millimetre in depth with 14.2mm but once again, the difference in hardly noticeable.

Nokia has reworked the physical slide-out keyboard in the N97 Mini to produce a much better variant that's better to use. The screen on the Mini tilts up at a fixed angle, in exactly the same way as it appears on the original N97. This time around the keys have been spaced out more for a much better experience in typing. There's a different, more solid feel to the keystrokes that's somewhat reminiscent of the Nokia Communicators of yesteryear

Just to add more confusion over the Mini naming, Nokia has equipped the phone with the same 5 megapixel Carl Zeiss lens camera as the fully blown N97 and not a lesser MP offering. One of our beefs with the original N97 flagship model was that it didn't arrive with an 8MP camera, whereas almost every other phone manufacturer had several handsets by that time with 8MP cameras. Nokia has since entered the 8MP market, but only recently, while others have since moved on with 10MP and 12MP offerings. However, we don't expect Nokia to be talking mobile cameras with more megapixels anytime soon.

Nokia has dropped the FM transmitter and the battery specs from the 1500 mAh in the original N97 down to a 1200 mAh battery in the N97 Mini, a significant fall in power. In our testing the N97 achieved nine and a half hours of call time before giving up the ghost. We're estimating the N97 Mini handset will most likely just pass the seven hour mark - we can only assume this is why Nokia has called this phone the Mini.