Nokia has dominated the phone market for what seems like an eternity, and while the spotlight has moved from their Nseries phones to iPhone and Android devices, Nokia is still clutching onto the top spot.

Even Nokia has admitted – in its tactics – that Symbian is no longer where it’s at for top end of the smartphone market, having revealed that it’ll be using the Maemo OS for future Nseries phones. However, the N97 Mini is stuck in Symbian station, but does it have enough strong points of its own to mitigate for its ageing operating system?

Well, yes and no.

As the ‘Mini’ of its title suggests, the N97 Mini borrows its design from its bigger brother, adopting a rather fierce slide-out Qwerty keyboard – you could chop a finger off with that thing – and a resistive touchscreen. However, compared to the full-sized N97, the Mini has a 3.2-inch screen instead of a 3.5-inch one and no D-pad on the slide-out panel.

What you do get for your cut-down size is a much more pocketable feel. Where the N97 felt ungainly, the N97 Mini is a lot sleeker, even if it’s not hugely reduced in pure dimension terms.

In spite of the reduced size, the Qwerty retains all of the good points of the N97's Qwerty. In fact, the lack of a D-pad makes it all the easier to reach across the keyboard with your two thumbs. Still, there’s not much feedback when you press a key, so you need to keep your eye on the screen more than you would with a more clicky keyboard.

The spacing of the keys is excellent though, with a discrete gap in between each and a handily placed space bar that rests just under your right thumb. We found our fingers resting far more comfortably over the N97 Mini’s Qwerty than that of the original N97.

Slot the Qwerty back in under the screen though and you’re back to a familiar, relatively unresponsive touchscreen. As the Nokia N97 Mini uses a resistive screen, definite pressure needs to be applied for the screen to detect your finger.

Plus, unlike the popular Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, there’s no bundled stylus, so you’ll have to operate the N97 Mini with your fingernail to get anything approaching a sense of responsiveness.

That Nokia has opted for two touch panels rather than real buttons for the softkeys doesn’t help either. As Symbian doesn’t exactly run like greased lightning on the N97 Mini, any lag on these buttons, of which there is some during the sort of everyday tasks you’ll be doing with your phone, feels like yet more laggy unresponsiveness. The resulting sense of sluggishness really doesn’t help you foster feelings of love and affection towards the N97 Mini.

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