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The Nokia army of touchscreen smartphones gets larger by the hour and the Nokia N97 mini is surely one of the most interesting new recruits. The Finnish company has obviously reconsidered its priories and now focuses on optimization, rather than expansion with its flagships The original Nokia N97 was the first sign of that as it hardly offered any ground-breaking features, instead relaying on the good all-round performance. However the first high-end S60 touchscreen handset left enough room for another similar handset in the portfolio and Nokia feel that its downsized version is enough to fill the gap.
Key features Slide-n-tilt 3.2" 16M-color resistive touchscreen of 640 x 360 pixel resolution 5 megapixel autofocus camera with dual-LED flash and VGA@30fps video recording Symbian OS 9.4 with S60 5th edition UI with kinetic scrolling Slide-out three-row full QWERTY keyboard ARM 11 434MHz CPU and 128 MB of RAM Quad-band GSM and tri-band 3G with 3.6Mbps HSDPA support Wi-Fi and GPS with A-GPS Digital compass 8GB onboard storage microSD card slot with microSDHC support Built-in accelerometer 3.5 mm audio jack and TV-out Stereo FM Radio with RDS microUSB port (charging) and stereo Bluetooth v2.0 Web browser has full Flash and Java support Nice audio reproduction quality Office document viewer
Main disadvantages The S60 touch UI is still inconsistent Outdated camera interface and features No DivX or XviD video support out-of-the-box No smart dialing No office document editing (without a paid upgrade) No camera lens protection No FM transmitter (though that may be stretching it too far) Nokia N97 mini vs Nokia N97 More compact (113 x 52.5 x 14.2 mm, 75 cc vs 117.2 x 55.3 x 15.9 mm, 88 cc) Lighter (138g vs 150g) Smaller display (3.2" vs 3.5") Less internal memory (8GB vs 32GB) Smaller battery (1200 mAh vs 1500 mAh) No lens cover No FM transmitter Arrow keys vs D-pad
Splendid audio quality Just as we expected, the audio output of Nokia N97 mini differs little from the excellent Nokia N97. The slight change is the intemodulation distortion, which reduced in half and is now only slightly below average. The handset did excellently in all other parts of our test, achieving some excellent scores. The frequency response of the N97 mini is almost identical to the one delivered by Nokia N97. It is pretty close to the perfect, the greatest deviating being only 0.32dB.