Nokia N97 Mini

Nokia N97 Mini Designed For the Style Conscious Mobile Phone User

Nokia N97 mini is one of the interesting mobile phones in the N series. Apparently, it is a slightly downgraded version of the original N97. Mini is more compact and light. With a smaller display, lesser internal memory and smaller battery, the Nokia N97 mini is perfect for those who want the high end features, but ready to lose some tweaks for the lower price. The Nokia N97 mini weighs 139 g and measures 13 x 52.5 x 14.2 mm. The battery too is downgraded from 1500 mAH in the N97 to 1200 mAh, but it still provides good value with a standby time of 320 hours for the 2G and 310 hours for 3G, talk time of 7 hours 10 minutes for 2G and 6 hours for 3G and music play of 32 hours.

The design of the Nokia N97 mini is flawless and it is definitely the compact smart phone in the side slider class of mobile phones. The Mini has a 3.2” TFT resistive touch screen with 360 x 640 pixels resolution and it can display 16 million colors. Even though the size of the screen is lesser than that of the N7, the image quality is the same. The touch screen is very sensitive and sunlight legibility is good. The video call camera, proximity sensor and ambient light sensor is located above the screen. The side slide QWERTY keyboard has 3 rows of keys and the layout is very much similar to the N97, except that the weird D-pad is replaced by traditional arrow keys, which are very much comfortable to use.

A 5 MP camera is located at the back of Nokia N97 mini along with dual a LED flash. The Camera is unprotected without cover and hence, you have to be careful while handling the phone. The still images are good, but videos are recorded only at 30fps. The music player is pretty decent with enough functionality, even though the looks are not so cool. The audio quality is excellent and the speakers deliver what is promised by the music player. The video player is basic without support for XVid and DivX videos. FM radio with RDS support is a welcome addition and the FM transmitter in the N97 is omitted.

The Symbian S60 5th edition operating system offers a unique touch screen experience. Due to firmware up gradation, Nokia is able to provide kinetic scrolling feature. Widget enabled home screen can be customized with your widget preferences. List items require double touch for opening, while a single touch on icons is all that is required to open applications. Preinstalled widgets corresponding to Amazon, Facebook, AccuWeather, CNN, and others are available. You can use the Ovi Store to download more widgets if you want. If you love Symbian mobile phones, then you will enjoy the tweaks spread out all over the interface in the Nokia N97 mini.

A pretty standard phonebook with enhanced search and find options is seen in the Nokia N97 mini. There is still no smart dialing even though voice dialing is provided. Incoming calls and alarms can be silenced by flipping the phone over, thanks to the accelerometer.

Nokia follows the standard interface for messaging – SMS, MMS and emails. Audio messages can be created using a separate editor. If you are more of a touch screen guy, you can use the alphanumeric onscreen keypad, though it must be admitted that the slide out keyboard is very convenient. The email client is neat and it supports a variety of protocols.

There are no complaints regarding connectivity options offered by the Nokia N97 mini, as it supports GPRS, EDGE and 3G. Wi-Fi lets you get connected anytime and anywhere. The web browser is good for browsing with flash and java support, but it is not touch optimized. The Nokia N97 mini has an onboard GPS receiver and it comes in handy with Ovi Maps.

Specifications:

2G Network	GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900
3G Network	HSDPA 900 / 1900 / 2100
	HSDPA 850 / 1900 / 2100 - American version
Announced	2009, September
Status	Available. Released 2009, November
Dimensions	113 x 52.5 x 14.2 mm, 75 cc
Weight	138 g
Type	TFT resistive touchscreen, 16M colors
Size	360 x 640 pixels, 3.2 inches
	- Proximity sensor for auto turn-off - Accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate - Full QWERTY keyboard - Handwriting recognition
Alert types	Vibration; MP3 ringtones
Speakerphone	Yes, with stereo speakers
	- 3.5 mm audio jack
Phonebook	Practically unlimited entries and fields, Photocall
Call records	Detailed, max 30 days
Internal	8 GB storage, 128 MB RAM
Card slot	microSD, up to 16GB, buy memory
GPRS	Class 32
EDGE	Class 32
3G	HSDPA, 3.6 Mbps
WLAN	Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, UPnP technology
Bluetooth	Yes, v2.0 with A2DP
Infrared port	No
USB	Yes, v2.0 microUSB
Primary	5 MP, 2592x1944 pixels, Carl Zeiss optics, autofocus, Dual LED flash, video light
Features	Geo-tagging
Video	Yes, VGA@30fps
Secondary	Yes, VGA@15fps
OS Symbian	OS v9.4, Series 60 rel. 5
CPU	ARM 11 434 MHz processor
Messaging	SMS, MMS, Email, Push Email, IM
Browser	WAP 2.0/xHTML, HTML, RSS feeds
Radio	Stereo FM radio with RDS, Visual radio
Games	Yes, DJ Club Tour + downloadable
Colors	Gold, Cherry Black, Garnet, White
GPS	Yes, with A-GPS support; Nokia Maps
Java	Yes, MIDP 2.1
	- Digital compass - MP3/WMA/WAV/eAAC+ music player - WMV/RealVideo/MP4 video player - TV-out - Voice command/dial - Document viewer (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF) - Video and photo editor - Flash Lite 3 - T9
Battery	Li-Ion 1200 mAh (BL-4D)
Stand-by	Up to 320 h (2G) / 310 h (3G)
Talk time	Up to 7 h 10 min (2G) / Up to 6 h (3G)
Music play	Up to 32 h