The Nokia N97 Mini is like the beta release of the N97 – with the N97 being the alpha version, perhaps the N8 will be the release candidate or perhaps even the final product? (I am using the software release life cycle terms used for Windows and other apps as an attempt at humour – however some people who have used the N97 would probably find the terms relevant.) Click below to read the full review…
What does it have?
- 3.2″ screen – 16:9 resistive touch 640×360
- Qwerty keyboard
- 5mp autofocus camera – no lens cover
- Carl zeiss branded lens
- Twin led flash
- GPS with satnav – Ovi Map – can be used Online or Offline (preload with maps on PC or through Wifi etc)
- Own voice – out of interest anyone else let you record your own voice for satnav?
- Adobe flash support
- 3.5 headphone jack
- 8gb memory – microsd slot for additional expansion
- 1200mah battery (vs 1500mah on the N97)
- VGA 30fps video or 16:9 640×360 mpeg4 with video light
- Firmware update over the air
- Stereo FM radio (but no transmitter – N97 and N86 feature this)
On first impressions the phone feels like it has a slightly complicated and clunky operating system. Do you press something once to open it or twice? It mostly seems that you have to press it twice, once to highlight something, and then again to open it. Some sections – email, license / about this phone don’t let you scroll with the screen / with your finger, and instead you have to use the right hand side scoll bar (which can be a bit tricky without a stylus – the larger screened N97 comes with a stylus, with the N97 Mini it’s an optional extra).
The phone occassionally* crashes due to an overly complicted and under tested operating system? Or memory problems? The N97 Mini has 512mb ram, twice what the N97 has, and even though the Mini often has 140+ mb free, apps still fail to load due to “lack of memory”**, the Photos app is a particular app that will not load when memory gets too restrained.
* occasionally - define occasionally? once every couple of days would be a rough estimate on how often it crashes? ** The 140mb free is actually free on the phone’s C: drive and not actually free memory that you can run apps in – to view available memory for apps you need a third party app such as RamBlow – this lets me know that running 4 apps, I have 19mb ram free (after cleanup).
This is where I go off on a random tangent (skip if you want): Perhaps Nokia will get symbian right with ^3 and 4. Perhaps maemo / meego is the answer – start from the ground up. But why not allow the consumer the choice? Develop the best, most versatile, appealing hardware, and offer it with a choice of Symbian, Maemo / Meego or Android? (see the Nokia N900 if you want to install anything…) But then you would have to support 3 operating systems when they are already developing and supporting 2. (Which Nokia don’t want to do, as they are discontinuing support for the N900 Maemo OS [citation needed])
Heres the weird thing – Do phones really need touch screens – I mean if you think about it – do you really want to be spending every day cleaning finger smudges off the screen? Apple seem to think you do – not only the screen – but now with the new iPhone 4 you can spend all your life cleaning the back as well, and hoping you never drop it – and the front and now back are both made out of glass. /random tangent end
Liverpool Cathedral taken with the Nokia N97 Mini - Click to Embiggen
Compared to the Sony Satio – the home screen widgets seems like a much better way to get updates from social sites like facebook, twitter, email etc compared to the tabs and non-existant social apps on the Sony Satio. However the Satio does have a good on screen keyboard whereas the N97 doesnt – it would be nice to have the choice on the N97 / Mini just in case you dont get on with the real keyboard. Opera mini has one so its definitely possible. And typing too much on the keyboard reminds me a lot of the ZX81 (not that anyone even knows what an Atari ST is anymore, let alone the ZX81) – or perhaps the Psion 3 (although nothings as good as the Psion5 yet, one can always live in hope).
Internet: As an excercise in futility thoroughly testing the device I attempted to edit and post this entirely using the N97 Mini: After a while Opera Mini / Blogger stopped saving changes made – so I ended up having to revert to using a full browser on a PC. It has already wiped out and lost about an hours worth of work and crashed twice three times since i started this – seeming to coincide with losing the WLAN connection. (The built in browser fails to work with blogger)
Opera App settings managed to set itself to have the internet connection as none. And since I’d told it to always connect it was always trying to connect to no internet – not even sure why this is possible? The built in phone connection manager often caused annoying problems like this, where you’ve lost the WLAN connection, yet it will still try and connect to it, even though it’s now miles away. Occasionally you’ll need to completely exit the browser and close all data connections before it will connect properly again.
The phone’s home screen widgets are worth exploring in more detail. They let you choose what you want to be displayed and (theoretically) auto updated on your home screen. You can choose from your Apps assuming the App supports it – so unfortunately some things aren’t supported. RSS feeds aren’t supported for example – they’re barely supported on the phone anyway – you have to view them inside the built in Nokia web browser. If you get a Vodafone branded phone they have provided an RSS Reader app – but for some reason you can’t select this as one of the home screen widgets – and it appears to simply be a shortcut to RSS within the web browser.
The home screen can show 6 different widgets – and is perhaps one of the best features of the phone – providing quick access to some of your favourite things, such as time / date, calendar, email, gravity (twitter), facebook, the weather and shortcuts to apps / programs. The Nokia N86 8mp as a comparison can show only a few items and the choice is much more limited: 6 shortcuts, Ovi Chat, Calendar, Email, and “Share your photos” (limited by only supporting uploads to Ovi,Flickr and Vox).
You can get extra apps from the Nokia Ovi store – such as “Communities” (in Beta) – you can put this on the home screen as a widget – but then it regularly logs you out and then you need to re-enter your password before you get anything displayed on your home page (Communities lets you link to your twitter and facebook accounts). The standard facebook app seems to work more reliably and works well on the homescreen as a widget. Another worth trying from Nokia’s beta labs is Nokia Bots – it’s meant to improve battery life, and learn some of your favourite apps, and automate actions for you.
Ovi Maps 3.04*** / Ovi Voice*** – Ovi Voice (now updated v1.1 includes 2 extra voice commands that were missing from the original version) lets you record your own voice for directions, although before you start, you need to choose between imperial or metric (kilometres vs miles), and can’t record both for easier switching in Ovi Maps. Ovi Voice only works with Ovi Maps v3.04 or higher. To use your “own voice” in Ovi Maps you need to open Ovi maps go to the navigation settings and select “Own Voice” in the Drive guidance settings (you also need to be signed in to Ovi Maps prior to selecting “Own Voice”).
The process for making you own voice is a little more complicated than I think it could be, particularly after you have recorded your “voice pack”, it goes like this:
- Before recording, make sure keypad tones are switched OFF otherwise the mic will pickup the sound
- Start Ovi Voice
- Click Record voice pack
- Click Start – or click Units to change between Kilometers or Miles (assuming you remember)
- Record each word or instruction one by one, by pressing the record and stop button.
- Go through each one using << or >> and using the playback button until you’re happy, recording things like “Turn Left”, and “Safety Camera Ahead” (although I’ve never heard this when actually using Ovi Maps, instead it seems to just make a “bip bip” sound), and you can record anything you want instead if you feel it would be funnier to say “Computer says no” instead of “Route recalculation”, or you could use some amusing accent…
- When you have finished, you need to record a brief description / preview of the voice pack, and then
- You need to enter the name, description, of the voice pack and your name, and have the option of sharing it with the internet (which could be useful if you ever wipe your phone and want to try and re-find it again from the internet, although whether you actually will be able to or not is an ENTIRELY different matter!)
- It then UPLOADs the entire voice pack to Nokia (whether you want to share it or not)
- Then you need to DOWNLOAD it, before you can use it! (Surely it should already be on the phone! But I digress, I guess you need to have it “processed” or made compatible with Ovi Maps by Nokia)
Before you download it, you can play it back, share it over text, facebook or twitter, and emailing the link to yourself would probably be a good idea just as a backup to make sure you can (try to) get it back at a later date should it disappear off your phone when you need to reset it for some reason…
*** I would recommend trying to get Ovi Voice and Ovi Maps to work using a wifi connection at home as this can all fail horribly when out and about trying to use a poor mobile phone signal, as successful uploading and downloading of data is needed before it will work as a voice navigation system.
Music playback: MP3 playback is good, as with the Nokia N86, it is very good.
Camera and Photo quality: Photos are quite good considering this isn’t a “Camera-centric” mobile phone such as the Nokia N8, Sony Satio, and Nokia N86, etc. Colours are bright and saturated, macro focus is very good with a closer focusing distance than the N86.
The photo software works quite well, and lets you customise the photo before shooting, and also provides a number of fairly useful editing tools for use in playback mode / photo viewer (brightness, contrast, sharpness, crop, resize, posterise, sepia, black and white, negative, red eye reduction, etc) although a few more, such as saturation and some more “artistic” effects would be nice. It also successfully fills the whole screen when you are viewing zoomed photos (for some reason the Satio didn’t).
Email on the Nokia N97 – the default version looks the best, updating it, turns it into a more unpleasant looking black and white text affair, and I struggled to get push email working on it initially until I realised you had to link it with your Nokia Ovi account. The phone can notify you to email with a beep or be silenced. 3rd party apps such as gravity can have the same notification settings as email / text so can also beep when you get new messages. Its just a shame it doesnt appear in the notifications area at the top like the twitter and faxcebook apps on the blackberry.
Conclusions? Over the course of using the phone for nearly a month as my main phone, I’ve found the Nokia N97 Mini to be a generally pleasing phone to use, excellent at phone calls, a mixed bag for email (the latest Nokia messaging for email seems worse on the Mini, than the N86), great for twitter (thanks to gravity), and good for facebook. Photos can be very pleasing, especially in bright sunny conditions, and the touchscreen and keyboard seem reasonably responsive, with a fairly low level of user frustration… the physical keyboard and home screen widgets make this a much more useful phone than any other phone I’ve ever used, and for that reason I like it a lot! The updated (latest 3.04) Nokia Maps and OVI voice make it suitable as a real replacement for sat nav devices (provided you have a suitable car holder and charger), and I’ve used it for several 400 miles round trips without any major problems (apart from it ignoring some mini roundabouts). MP3 playback is excellent, and sound quality and volume is better than expected.
The build quality is also good, with a nice metal surround on the front, and a solid metal battery cover on the back. The nice thing about Nokia phones seems to be that, even with camera-centric models, such as the N86, is that they do everything well, for example MP3 playback is excellent on both the N86 and N97 Mini, and the camera is very good on the N97 Mini, even though it’s not a camera-centric model. Whereas with other phones, such as the Satio, it’s a camera-centric model and MP3 playback seems to be poor, and if you buy a “Sony Walkman” phone, then most likely the camera will not be as good as other models. The Nokia N97 Mini is an enjoyable phone to use, and worth considering, even if it might appear a little dated compared to the newest Android and Apple phones.
+ Good earphones provided with remote control
+ Very good quality MP3 playback, loud without distortion
+ Metal battery cover
+ Photo quality and macro focus can be very good in bright sunlight, see examples.
+ Good home screen widgets
+ Free sat nav – mostly very reliable but you will need an in car charger (not provided) – can be used offline
+ Own voice lets you record your own voice(s) for satnav voice guidance
- Base of keyboard is wobbly unless you hold it (when resting the phone on a desk for example)
- Phone rests on camera lens / pop out area.
- Feels like you have to press too hard to press the keys
- 13 hour battery life
- Random “system error” on startup (sporadic)
- Wobbly micro usb socket
- Email not autoupdating (was using old email app, updating and reconfiguring resolved this – needs to be linked to nokia ovi account)
- No stylus provided
- Seems to have a faint whistle (may be mine that is “faulty”)
(Mostly) Edited in Opera Mini. The nokia browser has a tendancy to crash whenever I try and edit a blogger post. (Started in blogger, and then transfered to wordpress, and finished editing on a PC)
[...] to say, however, the screen clarity and brightness looks like a significant improvement over the Nokia N97 Mini and the N8 features an AMOLED screen, although this wasn’t a good thing when the Nokia N86 [...]