The Nokia N97 Mini : First Impressions

Featured

by Clinton Jeff | on December 16th, 2009 | 3 comments

We’ve had the Nokia N97 Mini for a couple days now, here at ZCJ.

After having spent months with the Original Nokia N97, here’s our first impressions of the Nokia N97 Mini.

What we liked :

The N97 Mini has a great weight to it. Not too light or too heavy. It feels heavier, but more premium than the Original N97, thanks to more metal being used on the device.
The size is perfect. Feels great in your hand in ‘ slide closed’ mode. You’ll still need both hands to type in slide-open mode though.

Build Quality is great. I know I said the Original N97 felt expensive, but the N97 Mini totally makes me take that back. The N97 Mini has more metal used (that is, it’s stainless steel Back plate in addition to the Metal Lining around the device) which surprisingly makes it feel a LOT more premium than the Original N97. It’s smaller size might also contribute to that feel. The device is pretty solid, and definitely wont fall apart easily.
The device looks very elegant with the mocha-dark-silver lining around the top of the device, and the pulsating Menu key.
Call Quality is great. No dropped calls yet.

The slider mechanism is amazingly very snappy and works great. When the slider’s closed there is no wobble or give at all. The hinge is made of a Metal Alloy, and looks and feels very strong. Here’s a video of the Hinge Mechanism at work :

The Slide-out Qwerty Keyboard gets a lot of attention and has a huge “Wow” factor to it.
The 3.2″ screen is nice , big and bright. Its just beautiful to watch videos on, or surf the internet. You wouldnt even notice that its slightly smaller than the 3.5″ screen on the Original N97.
The touchscreen feels a lot more responsive than the 5800. Even more than the Original N97 too. Guess Nokia’s still fine tuning the resistive touchscreens. It’s still not at iPhone level responsiveness of course (Resistive vs Capacitive touchscreen and all) but pretty darn good.
The camera’s pretty good. Great at morning shots, or where there’s ample light. The Dual LED Flash is decent at night. You dont have any of those ruin shots thanks to the flash-spreading-over-camera-lens-scratches that were a problem on the Original N97. Pretty much what you’d expect from an Nseries device really. (*rant about no Xenon Flash goes here*) We’ll have a separate post up on Camera Quality soon.
The N97 Mini charges via USB port. Gotta love that. There’s even a charging indicator next to the USB port, which lets your know the status of your battery charge (light goes off when fully charged).
The N97 Mini has the same sliding keylock switch that we loved on the Original N97, 5800 and N85.
The widget-ised Home Screen is still as useful as it was on the Original N97. I like that you can swipe the screen to hide them all so you can see your wallpaper. Definitely very cool. Would have benefited from having more than one Homescreen though. The Widgets on the Mini also have an “Offline” indicator when you put the Homescreen on Offline mode.
Our N97 Mini came with 3 Movies onboard (Spiderman 1, The DaVinci Code and “My Best Friends Wedding”) so I guess that’s a plus point too ?
There’s 250Mb of phone memory on the N97 Mini. No more “Phone Memory Low” problems like on the Original N97.
No GPS problems here ! GPS-locks happen in a matter of seconds, if not a minute or two, and stays locked-on.
The N97 Mini supports Kinetic Scrolling. No need to use those menu scrollbars, just tap and drag the screen around.
3.5 mm standard Audio Jack present. Check !
The N97 Mini has Nokia Messaging as its Default Email Client. Woot !

The Full Qwerty Keyboard’s great to have. Take a bit of getting used to, less time than the Original N97 did. The Keys are more spaced out and have better feedback to them, compare to the Original N97. You’ll get used to the Right-Side-Oriented-Spacebar before you know it. It also has the Longpress-for-symbol-to-appear feature that the Original N97 missed out on, in its initial firmware.

Battery life seems to be pretty okay, and almost identical to the Original N97.
With my screen on full brightness, after 2 hours of Music, 30 mins of calling, 30 minutes of GPRS and another 30 minutes of Wifi usage, about 20 minutes of GPS, 5 minutes of Camera use, and another 10 minutes of installing applications and configuring the device, the N97 Mini was only 2 bars down when I got back home. Of course i’ll have to test this out more intensively over the coming days. It looks like the N97 Mini might get you back home, with it still switched on, but you will have to charge it every night or so, depending on your usage.

What we werent too sure about :

No Camera Lens Cover. Only Nokia, could so badly traumatize people about Lens Cover scratches (ala on the Original N97), that people would prefer not having one. I’ve noticed my N97 Mini’s camera catching a lot of smudges on the lens. The Camera part of the N97 Mini also juts out a bit, which means when you place the device flat on a table, there’s a lot of contact between the Camera and table surface.

There’s still no proper place to download Widgets from. No separate Widgets section on the Ovi Store. You pretty much have to hunt around for applications and hope that they have a special widget version for the N97 Mini’s Homescreen.
The Mini comes with a lot of applications pre-installed. This can either be considered bloatware, or really useful. There’s slightly more Widgets installed on it, compared to the Original N97 though.
Just like with the Original N97, there is no TV-out cable provided in box. I’m assume Nokia either thought that people dont use this feature that much, and tried to cut down on costs, or thought people who had previous Nseries devices would buy the N97 Mini. In any case, there’s still “TV-Out” as a supported feature of the N97 Mini, but you’ll need to get that cable from somewhere else.
The loudspeaker’s “okay”. Its much louder than the E72, E75 and most Eseries devices we’ve used, but a tad bit quieter than the N96 or 5800. On the same level as the Original N97 I’d say.
The MicroSD slot is under the back cover. Mind you, its not under the battery, so you wont need to switch your device off to use it, and with 8GB of memory onboard, you might not need more. But it’s there anyway, and its in an awkward location.
Only 8GB of memory onboard. Okay that might be good enough for most people, but coming from 32 GB on the Original N97, 8GB on the Mini is a huge difference.
No ‘cool’ transitions at all in the UI. (Having only one at the Homescreen doesnt count!)

What we just plain didnt like :

There’s even less in-box material with the N97 Mini, than there was with the Original N97. Do not like this trend. You can check out our N97 Mini Unboxing to know more about it
No proper Dpad on the Keyboard. Really got used to having it around on the Original N97, and it really helps use the S60v5 Interface.

Has the same Ram problems that plagued the Original N97 though. It has 128Mb of Ram (like the Original N97) out of which only 40 Mb of ram is available for use at Startup. Which means if you’re a power user, you’ll find you can only have a few programs running in the background before they start automatically being closed. If you’re not a power user you’ll be pretty much fine though.
No FM Transmitter. Thought this would be a standard Nseries Feature by now. There’s still an FM Radio present though.

Here’s also a short video on our First Impressions if you’re interested.

So there you are. Our first impressions after two days of using the Nokia N97 Mini. Let’s see how many of our impressions will change by the time we review the N97 Mini later.

Remember, if you’d like to know anything about the Nokia N97 Mini, do leave us a note in the comments and we’ll try to include it in upcoming posts.

We also already have a ton of N97 Mini Pictures on our Flickr Album, and a couple video reviews of the N97 Mini already up at our YouTube Channel if you’d like to check that out in the meanwhile.

Follow us on Facebook:

Author Description

Clinton Jeff

Clinton is currently based in New Delhi, India and is executive editor for UnleashThePhones. He is responsible for all editorial decisions, and covers all forms of Mobile and mobile-related accessories. Cj is addicted to caffeine, social media, and technology. Always up for a good conversation, you can reach him through the contact form, his website, on Google Plus or on Facebook or Twitter: Follow @clintonjeff