N97 mini – First Look

Nokia has unveiled a small brother to N97 -the N97 mini.Its just been three months since the former was launched.Here is a first look at the new device. Does it actually score over its big brother – N97 ? Is less actually more here?

Firstly why mini? The first difference you will notice is the size.Its as if someone chopped off about a centimeter from the original N97  and this modification gave it the name – ‘mini’.Same N97 on all aspects but a bit smaller than the original.It is primarily targeting those customers who are not satisfied with the chunky casing of N97 .The price has to be considerably lower than N97 as Nokia doesn’t want clashing markets for both their flagship products.

The trade off for the smaller size is that the QWERTY keyboard has also been trimmed down.It features 3.2-inch touchscreen and full QWERTY keyboard. It measures 113 x 52.5 x 14.2mm compared to 3.5-inch touchscreen with a QWERTY keyboard in a bigger frame measuring 117.2 x 55.3 x 15.9 mm of N97.The D pad is gone which has been replaced by arrow keys.The keyboard might not be liked by some of the users of N97 as it nowhere as comfortable as N97 although Nokia claims to have improved the keyboard.Apart from lifting the keys a bit ,no other improvement is evident on the phone.

Also the screen has been reduced 0.3 cm to account for the size cut.The back of the phone has been made metallic.The N97′s 32 GB inbuilt memory has been reduced to 8GB expandable to 24 Gb with a 16 Gb microSD card.The camera is a 5 M.P. with dual LED flash and video light.The camera used by Nokia is same as N97 as they decided not to tweak with the camera though the lens cover is missing in this edition.N97 Mini supports up to 12 days standby time and up to 28 hours music playback. It supports video playback up to 210 minutes.

Nokia has persisted with its Symbian S60 series OS for this handset same as in N97.The phone’s software also features kinetic rolling.It has got the new Nokia firmware (2.0) which will also be introduced in N97 in mid September.Also Nokia Maps has been updated to version 3.0.It also has facility of  Lifecasting with Ovi.Lifecasting enables users to update their Facebook status directly from the phone’s homescreen.There are some other smaller tweaks which Nokia has introduced to increase the value of ‘mini’ over the original.

Now it is to be seen if the users prefer the new smaller,lighter edition of the phone with a slightly lesser comfortable keypad ( for some it might be better) and with a possible price cut of 100 euros or they would go for the original thing.Expected launch in India is in mid October with a price hovering slightly over Rs.30,000.It might be tough for Nokia to preserve the market for both the models as the overall experience of the phone is similar except a few changes here and there.More to follow when the phone releases in the market.

Here is a small video released by Nokia :