Manufacturer's Description
Lifecasting will premiere on the new Nokia N97 mini, companion to the successful Nokia N97. Designed with a social and style-conscious consumer in mind, the Nokia N97 mini is a smaller mobile computer with stylish stainless steel cues, featuring a tilting 3.2" touch display, QWERTY keyboard and fully customizable homescreen that makes each Nokia N97 mini as unique as a fingerprint. The Nokia N97 mini delivers a truly personal internet experience in a compact handset based on the iconic design of the Nokia N97.People want to bring their physical and online worlds together via the internet. The Nokia N97 mini is designed for this new social internet and to help navigate people and places. With lifecasting, the Nokia N97 mini and Ovi usher in the next chapter of personal and location-aware internet."The Nokia N97 mini is powered by a new Ovi Maps experience which makes searching, finding and navigating even easier. In addition to global pedestrian navigation, people can access premium content from Lonely Planet, Michelin and Wcities, turning the Nokia N97 mini into the world's smallest travel companion. Users can personalise the homescreen of their device even further with thousands of different applications and services available from the Ovi Store. From games, videos and podcasts to productivity tools and web services, Ovi Store is the easiest way to fill the Nokia N97 mini's homescreen with applications that reflect individual tastes.
Box Contains
This phone performs well in every area that a smartphone produced nowadays should perform in. There are not many things that I would change about this phone, though there are some problems.
The main feature of the phone is the keyboard, which slides out in a functional and stylish way. The keyboard itself is laid out in a qwerty fashion, and all the buttons are in the places that you would expect them to be. The numbers are above the first line of letters, so you have to press the 'upper character' button before pressing them, or set the input to numbers. The most used symbols each have their own respective places above the other two lines of letters. Some of these symbols aren't where you'd expect to find them on a keyboard, with the brackets on the very bottom left of the keyboard, but you get used to them eventually.
The homescreen is next, and it works very well. You almost fully customise the homescreen, with five bars worth of customisation that is possible. Shortcuts take up a quarter of a bar, and some apps take up a full bar, such as weather, music player, email, calendar and Facebook. There are no flick shortcuts from the homescreen, with a flick instead hiding all the items on the homescreen except the clock.
The menu button opens up a pretty standard menu, which can be organised to the users taste. It includes the main menu functions such as music, contacts, web, messaging, settings and other areas. From here you can also access the list of applications. The applications are set out in the same way as the menu, and can also be organised to put the most used at the top. The Ovi store is used to download more applications and games, but there aren't that many for it at the moment, though there is some third party support for this and the 5800 which is useful, especially as you can use these without having to change the phone.
The music player is pretty solid, and the earphones that come with the phone are actually pretty good. Music quality is as good as a standalone music player, and whilst the onboard speakers aren't great (when are they ever), that's not something I use the phone for. Artwork is a bit tempermental, and won't always transfer over to the phone, and I can't figure out why. It's not a big deal for me anyway, but it will be for some people.
The web browser is really good, and when connecting by wifi is incredibly fast, too. The phone can access most websites easily due to the built in java and excellent screen, but the best part for web browsing is the keyboard, which just makes it that much more enjoyable.
The camera on the phone is 5 megapixels using a Carl Zeiss lens, and takes pretty good pictures in the right conditions. The video camera isn't as good, but still isn't that bad.
All in all, the N97 mini is a solid phone with lots of capability, and I haven't had any major gripes with it since getting it. The amount of customisation of the phone is one of the main reasons for this, as if I didn't like a layout then I could just change it to one I prefered. For those that are looking for a smartphone with a keyboard, then the N97 mini is definitely a contender.
