Nokia N97 has a sibling : the new N97 MINI

The Nokia N97 mini is all about people expressing themselves whatever they do, whenever they choose, wherever they are – with richer content such as photos, videos and location information using social networking and sharing sites as well as calls, texts and emails.N97 was touted to be Nokia’s best yet and had a huge range of features and an impressive spec sheet that ran into pages. Although it was a really feature-rich and powerful device, but it wasn’t something that I could imagine using on a day-to-day basis. It felt more like a shrunk down version of a notebook rather than a mobile phone, which kind of overwhelms you every time you use it.But now, six months later, Nokia has released the new N97 mini.While the dimensions seem little different, the Mini feels much more comfortable in the hand than the somewhat bricklike N97. Its high-quality plastic body feels durable.

• DESIGN:
  Dimensions: 113 x 52.5 x 14.2 mm
  Weight: 138 g
  Designed with the style-conscious and socially active in mind, the Nokia N97 mini is a compact variation on the iconic N97 device. It features a full QWERTY keyboard and tilting touch-screen – now with flick-scrolling for even better usability.there’s less room for the display – which slips from 3.5- to 3.2-inches, though sticks at 640 x 360 resolution – but it also means it’s a far more pocket-friendly handset.
• DISPLAY:
  The Nokia N97 mini is a slim & stylish S60 5th Edition mobile computer with a large 3.2“, bright nHD (640 x 360 pixels and 16:9 aspect ratio) TFT color display with resistive touch screen and tactile feedback.Under sunlight, however, things go terribly wrong for the N97 mini, as the display visibility is very poor.Although the display on the N97 mini is probably as good as resistive touchscreens can get, they are still not as good as the capacitive displays when it comes to usability.
• CAMERA:
  The Nokia N97 mini has a 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics and autofocus mechanism. The phone can also record videos in VGA resolution at 30 FPS.You can switch on the LED flash to act as a video light, though autofocus no longer works. Once you’ve shot a clip you can upload it to various media sharing sites, including Flickr and Nokia’s own Ovi gallery.You can adjust the white balance, exposure, colour, ISO, self-timer, contrast, sharpness and sequence mode. You can also control the flash and turn the red-eye reduction on or off. The N97 mini camera does not support any of the fancy stuff like face detection or smile detection, but you do get geo-tagging feature,
• OPERATING SYSTEM:
  The S60 fifth edition operating system still feels unrefined when compared with webOS, iPhone, and Android 2.0, and unfortunately the smaller display (3.2 inches as opposed to 3.5 inches on the N97) only makes things worse. The typography and icons are tiny, and they fade into the background of the display. Opening an app requires two clicks, one to select the app and one to open it. Pressing twice gets old fast, especially when you’re used to just about every other touchscreen device out there with one-click access to apps.
• MULTIMEDIA:
  N97 mini is good enough to replace your music player thanks to the good music player, wide format support, excellent audio quality, good quality supplied earphones and large memory size. The only thing missing is an FM transmitter, which would have enabled the user to play the music files on, say, a car radio. The music player supports a wide variety of file types including MP3, WMA, WAV, eAAC+, MP4, and M4V formats. It has no visual effects or album art scrolling .Nevertheless, it is quite easy to use with the display’s large touch controls. Overall, music playback sounded very good. The video player is equally simple, but good nonetheless. However, you don’t get DivX or XviD support out of the box.
• OTHER FEATURES:
  The onboard 8GB of memory is less than the original N97’s 32GB, but slot in a microSD card and you’ll have up to 24GB to play with.in the N97 mini, Nokia has fitted a smaller 1200 mAh battery.Battery life has proven slightly better than what you’d expect from a current-gen smartphone, capable of going two days with regular use (and judicious use of the peak/off-peak push email settings). Nokia quote up to 430 minutes of GSM talktime (240 minutes of WCDMA) or up to 320 hours of GSM standby (310 hours of WCDMA).

N97 mini would really be a killer buy when the price has dropped a bit and when the phone has received a couple of firmware updates.UK stores have the N97 mini at £429 and the original at £449.The Mini N97 has a strong set of specs, a variety of multimedia features that work well, and a solid design. And the addition of flick scrolling is definitely a big improvement to navigation. Unfortunately, the Mini is hindered by the Symbian S60 OS. It simply lacks the silky user experience we’ve grown accustomed to in touchscreen devices.