Review of Nokia's N97 mini, a paired down QWERTY touch smartphone

The Nokia N97 mini is the second coming of the Nokia N97. While many of the its features and specifications are similar, the biggest change is in the name: Mini. It's smaller. But despite the more pocket friendly design and some ironed-out bugs, the phone is just as lackluster as the original.

Physical Aspects

The Nokia N97 mini has a black face with chrome accents running around its facade that attracts fingerprints almost immediately. Its 3.2-inch, 640 x 360 resolution resistive touchscreen^(INFO) display is sharp and the screen is bright enough for viewing under direct sunlight. In the hand the Nokia N97 mini looks and feels like a premium device, and its sharp metallic copper-colored battery cover will help it stand out among the crowds of BlackBerrys on a conference room table. At 138g it's fairly light and didn't feel like a brick in my pocket.

The 113mm x 52.5mm x 14.2mm (4.4in x 2in x .55in) N97-mini has a landscape slider form factor that slides open to reveal a full QWERTY keyboard. Until I broke in the phone in a bit, after about a week of use, the hinge was pretty stiff and hard to open. However, I did find that it was very sturdy and didn't feel flimsy.

The front of the phone has a silver menu key and touch-sensitive send/end keys that were responsive enough, although I prefer hardware keys to touch activated ones. Moving around the phone, there's a lock-toggle switch on the left side below a micro-USB charging port. The power button is on the top of the phone, next to a 3.5mm headphone jack, and I had to be deliberate in my finger press to activate it. The right side of the N97 mini is home to a camera-quick launch key and a volume toggle switch. I had to use my fingernail to remove the battery lid just to access the microSD card, and prefer an easier side-loading option.

There are two options for inputting text: either using the slide-out QWERTY keyboard, or by touch-typing on the device's on-screen alphanumeric keyboard. The on-screen keyboard is accurate, but there isn't a QWERTY option so it's rather useless for longer e-mails. The device's full QWERTY offers a bit more spacing than the original N97; it's also easier to type on because the keys have more bounce and feedback than the N97's. While the right-aligned space bar is awkward at first, I was able to get used to it after about a day. But even still, it's far from the generally perfect keyboards on Blackberry devices. The letters on the keyboard have a soft white backlighting while the number and symbols are clearly displayed with an orange glow. I also appreciated the navigational pad on the keyboard for moving around websites without touching the screen.