Generally, as we move from one cell phone generation to the next, designers carry forward the elements that work while dropping the ones that fail. The Nokia N97 mini is the exact opposite, compiling all of the poor decisions from the past five years into one convoluted hand set. It’s too-small, sluggish touchscreen dimly offers a clumsy interface cluttered with unused options, atop a keyboard too wide to use comfortably on a handset too small, hampered by software and apps that deliver a hobbled experience. What on Earth were they thinking?

Touch Screen

The display is an old style resistive touch screen. There are no swipes, flicks, pinches, or gesture controls of any kind, but just like an ATM machine you merely tap the options that appear onscreen and select from the next that appear. Compared to the other touch phones on the market which use capacitive screens, it’s sluggish in response. Some menus offer a thin scrollbar on the right side, but on such a narrow screen it’s difficult to get your finger in there to reach it and you’re better off using the directional arrow keys on the slide-out keyboard.

With a resistive display there are additional films and layers applied to the screen to offer touch controls and these reduce the clarity of the screen. Most touch phones today offer glass screens, Nokia’s using the older plastic kind and when you combine that with the resistive layers you end up with a display that is dim with text that isn’t as clear as it is on other handsets. Within the phone is a 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, but you wouldn’t know it through the haze of the screen which makes taking pictures with any photographer’s eye impossible.

Design

The N97 mini has a nice cherry black finish and a beautiful back light supporting its slide-out QWERTY keyboard. As the sliding mechanism brings out the keyboard from underneath, it pops the display up at a beautiful angle, but with exposed hinges that look awfully thin and worry me as to their durability.

There’s nothing wrong with a petite phone as long as everything fits to it proportionately, but Nokia’s made an odd choice here with a narrow design just two inches wide. This makes the screen slim and tall, leaving little maneuverability for using touch controls, and when turned to landscape mode, very, very wide, enough that I found it hard to type with my thumbs on the keyboard. Rather than grip the phone from the sides and type, I found I had to hold it from the bottom of the keyboard, a very awkward position.

Interface

The latest version of Nokia’s Symbian OS 9.4 is the software in control here and it shows all the signs of an older system that’s been given updates to work for a touch screen, rather than software rewritten from scratch. Although customizable, the main menu is squeezed into the narrow screen with a complex assembly of box-shaped icons. When you have a smaller screen, it’s best to keep the information displayed on it simple, instead Nokia has jammed it all in, hoping that by making the most common fields the biggest boxes that will make it easier for you to scan past the others in smaller boxes.

The phone’s navigation is cluttered with options and settings that would be better off tucked out of the way. I wasted quite a bit of time looking for the camera icon only to find that there isn’t one, you’re limited to using the dedicated camera button on the phone itself.

Web Surfing And Maps

Nokia’s website listed “full web browsing of real web pages”, but I couldn’t find it. Instead the web browser pulled up error messages along with the pages I surfed to, displayed sites in a summary view where only the most basic elements were displayed, and had to view the pages using zoom controls and the directional arrows on the keyboard just to explore specific articles. The N97 mini includes both Wi-Fi and 3G internet connections, but the software hampers your ability to really make use of them.

Nokia uses their own Ovi Maps service which includes a number of added options including Michelin and turn-by-turn navigation with voice prompts. While it grabs a lock through the GPS quickly, I found the text on the maps hard to read. You’re forced to zoom in far to close just to get the fonts to a point where you can read them and the N97’s older style screen tends to wash out in direct sunlight. The service itself is good, takes awhile to get used to all the controls, but is hampered by the N97 mini’s narrow screen to the point of being useless.

Apps

The N97 mini uses two apps systems. There’s the old-fashioned design, where the phone comes with a selection of pre-installed software including calendar, calculator, recorder, To-Do, etc. and then through the use of an “Applications” app you can access a different menu system on the phone where you can store and use apps from Nokia’s Ovi store which includes a small selection of games, news feeds, and reference guides, both for free download and purchase. The selection is so small, however, and most of the apps are merely duplicates of their releases on phones by other brands, that it doesn’t serve as a major reason to buy the N97 mini, and it should be.

Old World Phone Grasping At New World Features

On paper the N97 mini looks impressive. Slender cheery black handset with innovative slide-out keyboard, 3G, quad-band, Wi-Fi, turn-by-turn GPS, 5 MP camera, apps, all the latest sensors, 8GB of memory plus SD Micro Cards, but in use it’s a disaster of design, a cluttered world jammed into a poorly proportioned phone handicapped by a resistive touch screen and obsolete design ideas.