THE NOKIA N97 MINI comes on the coattails of the Nokia N97, a handset that was announced at Nokia World in late 2008. The original Nokia N97 mobile phone took over six months to appear in the shops, apparently due to ironing out feature interoperability issues.

The wait for the Nokia N97 Mini shouldn't be as long. The mobile was announced earlier in September at Nokia World - where we managed to have a quick hands on with it - and is due to hit the shelves this holiday buying season.

Nokia's N97 Mini is altogether a rather deceiving product name by the Finnish phone makers as it's not really a miniature version of the Nokia N97 whatsoever. In fact it's more or less a copy of the original Nokia N97 handset, only with a more sensible storage capacity that should really have appeared in the first iteration.

When it was announced at Nokia World last year, the Nokia N97 came with the largest amount of onboard memory in a phone at that point at a whopping 32GB, with a further possible 16GB in the form of a microSD card. The largest internal memory seen in a Nokia handset prior to that time was just 8GB with the N95 and N96, which made the N97's large memory a big leap for the firm.

This 32GB of storage came at a fairly hefty price tag back then at €550, whereas the N97 Mini has been marked down to the relatively less princely sum of €450. The N97 Mini has just 8GB of onboard storage, which is a much more sensible amount we believe. Were it not for miniaturisation engineering issues, we think Nokia should have released the N97 Mini first and followed that with the N97 offering its larger form factor, screen size and memory storage.

Source: Inquirer