Ive had my Nokia N97 for around a month now and I can say quite a lot has happened regarding the phone this past month. First Nokia has announced and new slimmed down version named The Nokia N97 mini but with not much of a slimmed price tag selling for only £70 cheaper than the original n97 with the Nokia Store selling the Mini for £429 Sim free and the original for £499. So what are the differences between the two, well not a lot to be honest. The size: The mini comes in at 113 x 52.5 x 14.2 mm with the original coming in at 117 x 55.3 x 15.9 mm, The mini weighs 138g and n97 weighing 150g. Although the mini has a front camera there is no video calling (but who really uses video calling ?) a few other differences between the two are that you will get 8gb with your n97 mini compared to the 32gb inside the original model. I think 8gb may not be enough if your wanting to put movies music etc, so maybe 16gb would have been just right. Also with the mini you wont get a lens cover over the impressive 5 megapixel camera and it doesn’t include a D pad on the QWERTY keyboard which i have found very useful when surfing the web, searching through contacts etc. So you decide is it worth paying around £70 pound more for the full N97 or saving that money and getting a slimmed down version. Personally if I was giving the option to get the mini over the original I would pay the extra money and get the original.

Okay that’s enough on the not so mini, mini N97, I will get back to the point of my article what has actually changed since my first post “Living with the Nokia 97- 1 week on. So the Ovi store :\ there a few better apps and games available but they still have a pretty ridiculous price, like the game “Pro Evolution Soccer 2009″ will cost you £4, Yeah you might be thinking cheapskate,

but when it looks like this it should be like £1. Also above EA sports Fifa 09 which will cost you… yes £4.00. If you want a decent football game for the iPhone you can get this from the app store, for ….wait £3.99

I’m not comparing the graphics of the two phones here, just why would you pay 4.00 for the top two games, when the Apple App store will charge you the same for the a much better looking game. So as you can tell I am still not a fan of Nokia’s Ovi Store. But keeping in mind the Ovi store is still young and it has taken the Apple App store over a year to get to where it is today. So I’ll give Ovi a year to turn itself into an App store killer.

But Ovi isn’t the N97s fault, so since my last post whats gone good and whats gone bad with my N97, First the bad things but I must say there’s not really alot to rant about, I’ve heard alot of reports on the internet of crashing, freezing but I’ve only experienced crashing and freezing once or twice, no more than my previous phone the LG Viewty. There has also been alot of reports that the phone is slow, saying the processor inside the phone cant handle everything going on, I’ll admit from time to time the phones reaction times are pretty slow like opening my messages it will take longer than it should do, but thats only sometimes. 90 percent of the time the phone is pretty perfect in terms of well everything, no crashing, no freezing and its not slow at all. There is one thing that I find rather frustrating though, the battery life. If you use some of the phones features such as playing music, surfing the web etc you will be lucky to get a day out of it! I recently took the phone to a four day music festival after playing abit of music on it and taking a few snaps the battery had completely died by the end of the first day, so I was left without a phone for 3 days. Other than that nothing has really annoyed me with the phone, I still believe its a brilliant phone and still one of the best phone currently on the market.

Now everything I still love- Yes the excitement of a new phone has worn off. But I still love sliding the phone to reveal the QWERTY keyboard which I still love using and I still use it to text instead of using the touch screen. One thing has changed though, as I reported in my last post “I have even found my self using my phone for my music player instead of my ipod touch.” this has changed and I have gone back to the ipod mainly because there is no decent way of syncing my new music onto the phone, so I have found myself with an in-updated music collection, this is why ive gone back to my iPod and it’s just simpler to play your music on, But there is some music players you can download onto your phone which do give an easier, better looking way of playing your music. From my last post I didn’t really have the chance to tell you about the camera as I hadn’t really used it that much, but after spending a good solid month using the phone, I must say its ones of the best cameras ive seen on a phone with a great flash although it is not a Xenon flash so instead it has duel LED but this still give a very bright decent flash. One problem is the home screen widgets, but this really reverts back to Ovi, but this was one of the N97s main selling points was the customizable home screen, but I haven’t really changed my widgets around since I got the phone, which are Facebook, Music Player, Shortcuts and the NewsBuzz widget, this is mainly because the lack of widgets I have found available which is a little disappointing as I love the whole idea of your own home screen.

So this really sums up my thoughts on the N97 after a month of having it, So to finish things off, my final thoughts are that I still love the n97 although the whole excitement of a new phone has gone. There have only been a few minor let downs mainly from Ovi. So be sure to keep visiting www.technoblast.co.uk for much much more.

Thanks for reading.

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