With the entire blogosphere cock-a-hoop over the iPhone 4 and the Samsung Wave HD, we at JOE thought it would make sense to revisit one of the sleekest smartphones on the market, the Nokia N97 Mini, to see how it holds up in its increasingly crowded market. Quite well, as it should happen.
The little brother of the Nokia N97, the Mini arrived in Ireland in late December 2009, yet is still arguably the most advanced Nokia handset on the market. To the unitiated, Nokia’s flagship phone resembles many current smartphones in appearance, yet its slide-out QWERTY keyboard is a unique selling point and instantly answers a familiar smartphone problem – crowded, thumb-heavy text-messaging.
Aside from its tilt slider capability, the N97 Mini impresses most with its customisable home screen and plethora of apps from the Ovi Store, with everything from classic puzzle titles to ATM finders that can all be placed at your fingertips anywhere on your home screen. The Mini’s display itself is 3.2 inches, with it’s on-screen content is viewable in either portrait or landscape mode as you rotate the device. All of which sounds very impressive, but what’s under the hood of this device?
The N97 Mini features a 5-megapixel digital camera, suitable for up to 10 hours of video on its 8GB internal memory, Nokia Music Manager compatibility to upload up to 1700 tracks, an Assisted-GPS receiver and a high-speed 3G Internet connection. While that all sounds great on paper, we decided to swap our SIMs, flog the instruction manual and test the handset out ourselves – after all, if a smartphone is truly ‘smart’, it should be as intuitive as possible for its sometimes non-smart users.
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After a week in possession of the Mini as our primary phone, we were impressed with the handset, and can safely offer our recommendation, thought with a few caveats. To Nokia’s credit, the handset is ideally priced for customers that want a smartphone experience but are unwilling to shell out the respective €599/699 required to acquire a 16GB or 32GB pay-as-you-go iPhone 4.
The phone also benefits from having two basic homescreens, one which features essentials (music, basic apps, clock display) and another which resembles the typical 12-icon tiled display we associate with today’s smartphone. Both screens can be toggled by pressing the button positioned next to the dialing icon. It’s a simple idea but proves quickly second-nature, while it’s heartening to see that the handset’s photo/video functions are first-rate.
On the downside, it’s hard to argue that certain elements of the N97 belong to a pre-smartphone era, most noticeably the finicky, overly complex array of text-messaging options, which haven’t changed much since Nokia’s 3210 days. Another drawback that quickly grates is the prevalence of quick ‘loading’ screens, which occur for everything from switching to camera mode or altering your display view. Again, these are much-used functions of your N97 Mini experience, yet are comparably counter-intuitive when lined up against their pricy rivals.
In short, the Nokia N97 Mini is a well-built, reasonably-priced handset that is certainly great value considering the wealth of options it brings to its crowded market. While this handset won’t re-invent the wheel (and perhaps isn’t expected to), it is nonetheless a stellar handset from the Finish giants, and performs at least 95% of its everyday functions with a minimum of fuss.
The Nokia N97 Mini is available from the online Vodafone store and costs €369 for new customers.
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