Shopping CartNokia N97 mini 8 GB Unlocked Phone, Free GPS with Voice Navigation and Navigation/Car Kit–U.S. Version with Full U.S. Warranty (Black)
date : September 1st, 2011Nokia Smartphone
Review : 3 Reviews
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List Price : $ 579.00
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Tags : Black, Free, Full, KitU.S., Mini, Navigation, Navigation/Car, Nokia, Phone, U.S., Unlocked, Version, Voice, Warranty
Seriously well put together phone – with one goof,
January 9 2010: I amended the review to add some details about a couple problems I’ve had with the phone, slowdowns which lead to lockups and twice it suffered a system crash that leads to wiping out the phone’s memory. I devoted a lot of the amended review to a hassle I had with Nokia’s customer service. I realize that’s unfair and irrelevant to the review of the phone, so I removed it.
Although it says I bought the phone from Amazon I actually bought it direct from Nokia. I canceled the Amazon order when I thought they had the wrong color. I’m sorry that happened because buying it from Amazon would have been a better experience. (another edit: since installing the new firmware, any stability issues the phone had seem to have been solved)
My original review:
The quality of the materials and the fit/finish & construction is the first thing I noticed, taking this out of the box. It has nice surfaces everywhere, a shiny steel bezel on the front and highlights around the bottom section, a matte black (brownish) metal finish on the bottom with a steel battery door and camera lens bezel. The battery door latches securely (and easily) unlike any phone I’ve ever owned. The phone feels heavy in a high quality way. It fits in your hand in a way that makes it feel much thinner than you would expect from the measurements. The flare at the bottom makes it feel more secure in your hand. The raised lens bezel makes it easy to avoid inadvertently using the camera lens as a finger grip.
so many pros…
– Touchscreen is very responsive and has kinetic scrolling and it’s easy to stop the screen without accidentally launching something.
– Browser is full screen and looks great. (embedded con – I’m not sure I like the controls that pop up for some basic stuff like “back” or bookmarks. I can’t find an easy way to backtrack in sites without bringing up the clunky set of controls.)
– The 3-row back-lit keyboard is easy to see in dim light, and it looks awesome with the gray and orange illumination. The layout works great for me, I’m already comfortable with how it works and find it much nicer than keyboards with 5 rows of keys.
– 16 x 9 screen has excellent color and brightness, even outside. Perfect format for watching movies full screen.
– Has native support for Flash and java so Youtubes and flash based websites look like they should. (does not support Flash 10 – hopping for an update)
– When you open the keyboard the screen tilts into a good viewing angle, either for typing with your thumbs or setting it on a table. Works great for watching videos, you don’t have to prop it up on something.
– Stereo speakers sound great for speaker phone. (edited to add: the speaker quality continues to impress me. They also work good for listening to the FM radio.) Music sounds outstanding through headphones, it sounds like a high-end MP3 player. Music Player has the best sorting, album art, searching, Playlist creating and ID3Tag editing I’ve ever seen on a phone – wow.
– Accelerometer is pretty fast and all menus and screens and all but a few third-party apps have a landscape mode. You have to turn it on, it’s off by default. The keyboard forces a landscape mode.
– This is the most customizable phone I’ve ever had. Nothing is locked in place, put it wherever it works best for you. I’ve already downloaded about a dozen themes and love how much you can personalize the appearance of the menus and screens, even the icons.
– The widgitized home screen is of course just as customizable but has another feature I wasn’t expecting. You can swipe your finger across it and hide all the widgets so your phone display is just the wallpaper you chose and the clock at the top. Another swipe brings them back.
– Call quality and signal strength is very good – what you would expect from Nokia. I’m replacing a Samsung Eternity and this phone is a dramatic contrast, it’s so much better.
– All the phone stuff, voice dial, speed dial, endless contact list with all the fields you could ever need, excellent contact list access/search, full MP3 ringtones, etc. It’s all there and implemented very well.
– It comes loaded with apps, all of which can be removed if you want. Email is available in a couple different ways, a pay push system or free mail client in the messaging bundle. POP3 or IMAP.
– App stores for Symbian S60 are plentiful and there are loads of free apps and themes as well as ones you pay for.
– GPS is fast to fix on a location and stays locked on very well. Works much better outside than it does indoors.
– WiFi was easy to set up with MAC address and WPA security on my home system. It seems a bit flakey about staying connected or the phone deciding which network to use for certain apps, GSM or WiFi. I haven’t found the way to configure this yet but I’m sure it’s in there somewhere…
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|At last!,
I’m a gadget nut, with a particular affinity for Nokia and Symbian, which I find far more robust and user friendly than many of the other options out there. I’ve used a number of Nokia E-series products, and returned to my E71 again and again – like many people, I think it’s one of the best smart phones ever made. Nonetheless, I recently tried the N97 (twice). I returned the first one – it was clearly not ready for prime time. The second time around was better, because the firmware was more evolved; however, the phone was just too big for me, particularly after using the E71.
When the N97 mini became available, I was initially put off by the negative reviews, including those that made it seem like less than the n97, but for about the same cost. I’m glad I ignored those reviews. This is a phenomenal phone, starting with the phone. In my opinion, Nokia is matched only by Blackberry when it comes to signal strength and call quality, and I don’t understand why professional reviews just gloss over the phone capability – for me, it’s one of the most important features of a phone. The home screen is highly modifiable – something that was a deal killer for me re: iPhone (I don’t want to know that I have an email; I want to be able to see the email itself without having to dig down through four menus). The web browser is snappy and excellent. The size is perfect. Build quality far exceeds that of the N97, and is on par with the E71. The touch screen is very responsive – I’ve read a lot about resistive vs. capacitive; however, I was never comfortable with the iPhone but feel that mini works very well.
If you’re on AT&T and are bemoaning the fact that you can’t get a decent Android phone, then get this. You’ll be happy you did.
All and all, very pleased with the purchase. The only cautionary note is that if you use all of the widgets and leave things on, like greader, facebook, etc., you’ll def. run into battery issues. But you would with any phone.
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|The Swiss army knife of the phone world,
I have had this phone for a little over a week now and am quite happy with the results so far. Before I begin though, I feel like a few caveats are in order. 1) If you are expecting an Apple iPhone UI experience in terms of simplicity and whistles and bells, you will be disappointed with the OS employed by this smartphone (Symbian S60 5th Edition). 2) You definitely need a data plan to get full use of this phone – preferable through AT&T to take advantage of 3g speed. 3) This phone uses resistive touch screen technology – as such, it is not as sensitive as that used in many commercial touch screen smartphones on the market in the US. If you’re coming from that background, you’ll find this a little difficult to get used to. That said, if you live in a colder environment, you’ll be able to use this phone while wearing gloves.
With that out of the way, here are the impressions I have:
1) This is a well-built phone with nice use of metals and higher quality plastics. It feels great in the hand – solid and compact. There is no creaking whatsoever (you can’t even tell straight up that the phone has a keyboard) and the hinge seems durable and well designed – time will tell. On the negative side, I have noticed that there is a little light leak coming from a couple of the keys and the camera key also feels a little stiff.
2) I found the keyboard to be tactile and I was able to adapt to it pretty quickly. There is enough space between the keys to make typing a relatively accurate experience. The space key is slightly offset which may throw some people.
3) The overall feel of the OS is pretty zippy. Coming from a Nokia N95 8gb, I am definitely experiencing a speed increase in menu transitions and application load times.
4) The out-of-the box firmware appears quite stable. I’ve had the phone for over a week and have not experienced a lock-up yet. My previous phone would crash at least once every couple of days so stability is a key issue for me and this phone (so far) appears to pass muster.
5) The home screen is completely customizable. This is a great feature and gives you virtually one touch access to the things you use the most – be it applications, contacts, music player and a whole range of web widgets (facebook, email, weather)
6) The GPS gets fast locks especially when use the assisted GPS function (allowing the phone to access data from the internet to obtain a quicker GPS fix). The phone also comes preloaded with map data for the US and Canada. For voice navigation you’ll need to purchase a license from Nokia. I find their service to be accurate and okay value for money.
7) The camera takes excellent pictures for a phone and is one of the main reasons I bought this phone. I am noticing a slight improvement on the camera module from the N95 even though the specs are virtually the same. I imagine that Nokia have tweaked the camera processing software somewhat. Worth mentioning though is that the quality is never going to be as good as even a rudimentary compact camera – especially in low light conditions. That said, always having a camera on your person for on the fly photography is awesome. It’s also great to be able to upload to flickr or facebook upon capturing a photo you want to share.
9) Connecting to a computer is simple. Nokia provides the OVI suite which helps to sync your calendar, music, photos/videos etc. You can also download new maps and backup your phone data using this software. Unfortunately, you’ll need a PC to install it. Using a Mac still allows you to access the phone in mass-memory mode so you can drop down music to the phone manually.
10) Battery life is pretty good. Ultimately of course it depends on how you use the phone as to how long it lasts. If you’re using data heavy widgets and GPS, you’re battery will become depleted quite quickly. It easily lasts a full day of average use (couple of calls, 10-15 text messages, an hour of music while browsing the internet on Opera Mini, reviewing some emails from my Gmail account and taking 2 or 3 photos)
11) You can get a whole range of 3rd party apps for this phone – free and paid for. I recommend downloading Opera Mini (an alternative browser), Fring, (a VOIP application which allows connection to the Skype network) and Joikuspot (a app that turns your phone into a wireless hotspot and comes installed on this phone). Nokia’s own OVI store can be used for downloading apps but I have not had great experiences with this method – I find their app store to be poorly organized and the access point is slow and klunky. There are other…
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