Nokia's flagship N97 seems to be gaining momentum in the high end markets to justify coming out with a lite version aimed at a wider market audience. Unveiled and launched at the recent Nokia World 09 in Stuttgart, Germany, the new Nokia N97 Mini is expected to hit the markets in time for the holidays with a SIM-free street price of €450 before subsidies and taxes. That's about 100 cheaper than its hefty N97 brother.

Smaller but Better

Housed in the smaller body measuring 113 x 52.5 x 14.2 mm against the big brother's 117.2 x 55.3 x 15.9 mm and weighing 138g as against 150g on the N97, the new N97 Mini enjoys a firmer and more compact body containing about the same electronic wizardry that puts the N97 as Nokia's flagship smartphone. More than that, the new handset gets a higher firmware version right out of the box. This allows the N97 Mini to feature flip scrolling similar to the famous kinetic scroll feature on the iPhone.

Nokia has bundled the Mini with a newer version of Ovi Maps that allows users to download related navigational content from Wcities, Michelin and Lonely Planet sites. It gets new widget icons on a homescreen that has better personalization features thanks to the firmware upgrade. Those new widgets on the homescreen allow instant access to your favourite files and phones apps as well as social networking sites.

Nokia has partnered with the world's most popular socializing site Facebook for its Lifecasting feature on the Mini – the first Nokia handset to have one. This allows instant updating of your facebook right form the homescreen as well as update on your location details – an added dimension to social communication and online data sharing..

The Nokia N97 Mini's smaller body naturally comes with a smaller resistive touchscreen at 3.2 inches, down from the 3.5 inch display on its big brother as well as a smaller QWERTY keyboard with a more compact set of keys to make typing on them even more difficult for a QWERTY-equipped handset. Nokia also had to compromise on the internal memory bringing it down from 32Gb on the N97 to just 8GB on the Mini.

This shouldn't cause any alarm as the microSD can add 32GB to its storage capacity on both handsets. A slightly more relevant compromise is the battery life which gets down to 7 hours of talk time on the mini where its big brother benefits form 9 hours. This is due to the smaller BL-4D lithium-ion battery used in the Mini compared with the BP-4L on the heftier N97.

Common Features

Apart from that, the N97 Mini is every bit its big brother. They're both quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE on 2G and UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA on the 3G network. Wireless data connectivity over Bluetooth 2,1 with EDR and WiFi 802.11b/g are there too. You get the same stereo FM receiver, GPS with Ovi Maps, Bluetooth A2DP and a 3.5mm headphone jack.

There's the familiar 5-megapixel autofocus camera with Cark Zeiss Tessar lens and LED flash as well as geo tagging. For that, the Mini is still a flagship smartphone though targeted at a wider market with a more affordable €450 SIM-free price before taxes and subsidies. With all the downsized but remarkable updates on the old N97, getting it at a €100 lower price seems worth it.

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