Before we write another word, we owe you an apology. Well, an explanation at least. You see, we’re as tired as you are of every new phone being compared to the iPhone. It’s dull, predictable and, most of the time, inappropriate. One of the things we love about the world of gadgets is diversity. Hell, it’s what this site is all about.
There’s no reason for every new phone to be compared to the iPhone. Most have been designed with a different target audience in mind, with a different set of objectives. Take Nokia’s 5800. Routinely compared to Cupertino’s finest but, in fact, it’s not supposed to compete with the iPhone; it’s a budget device. The N86? Nope, it’s an old-school camera phone and all the better for it. The N900? No again, it’s a phone-capable internet tablet designed for techies and very early adopters (even The Guide can’t be tempted yet). And yet all of these devices routinely get put up against the iPhone in comparison reviews. It’s silly and ultimately unhelpful.
When it comes to the Nokia N97 mini however, we really can’t avoid the iPhone. You see, if ever Nokia has produced a device designed to compete with the iPhone, then this – surely – is it: sexy form factor, media-focused touch screen, decent camera. This is a ‘digital lifestyle’ phone designed to appeal to the well-heeled: premium materials, social media widgets, high-quality optics. No doubt about it, this is a device that is squarely aimed at the iPhone market. So, how does it fare?
We’re long-term Apple fans and devoted iPhone users. Not because we buy into the hype, not because Steve Jobs’ reality distortion fields works on us but because, objectively, no other device has yet managed to marry advanced tech, user-friendly interface and gorgeous design in quite such a compelling package.
To find out whether the Nokia N97 mini stood a chance of dethroning our iPhone, we have just spent a week using it as our main device. So, what follows is a pretty subjective comparison between the two. It’s about what matters to us in a phone, but it’s not an exhaustive review of the N97 mini. If that’s what you’re looking for, check out All About Symbian’s excellent and very thorough review.
Hardware and form factor
We’ll be as succinct as we can here: in our view, Nokia has hit it out of the park with the N97 mini’s hardware. It looks gorgeous and feels exactly ‘as it should’ in your hand. While the iPhone always feels a little too wide and tablet-like when we’re using it to make calls, the N97 mini feels damn near perfect. And that’s not all, the mini has another trick up its sleeve: that clever hinge on the screen and the physical keyboard that lurks below.
The keyboard is great by the way: we really enjoyed it. True, the 3-row layout takes some getting used to (many reviews have complained about the odd space bar placement) but we found ourselves typing away quite happily after just one day of use. The keys, though small, have decent feedback and are well spread out. Hats off to Nokia.
The only criticism we have – but unfortunately it’s a huge one – is the resistive screen. Why Nokia didn’t fit a capacitive one we simply can’t understand. It would have made all the difference. In what way? Well that leads us to…
Ease of use
Is the N97 mini as easy and pleasurable to interact with as the iPhone? No, not even close. There are three main reasons for this: its software (which we’ll discuss in the rest of this review) and a combination of under-powered innards and that resistive screen we just mentioned.
Bottomline? When we put our finger to the iPhone’s screen, something happens. Instantly. And it’s what we intended to have happen. On the N97 mini we often found ourselves waiting, second-guessing ourselves (had we pressed hard enough?), pressing again, waiting.
We think that lack of RAM and a slow processor are partly to blame but the real issue here is the resistive screen. Yes, it may be more responsive than the one on the N97; yes, it may work with gloves or extreme weather conditions when the iPhone’s capacitive version won’t, but we don’t care: when you compare it to the iPhone’s in 99% of typical use scenarios, it’s mushy, unresponsive and just downright unpleasant to use.
And what a shame that is because it has a dramatic knock-on effective on most of the software and therefore the entire user experience on what would otherwise have been a great device.
To be fair to the N97 mini, if simply pressing buttons was all you wanted to do with the screen, it wouldn’t be too bad. The real problems start when you want to scroll. As a result, using Web, Mail, Gravity, Google Maps all suffered greatly. You simply don’t have the kind of precision that is inherent in using the iPhone’s glass capacitive screen. Too often what was happening on the display didn’t have any relationship to what we’d done with our finger on the screen.
There’s something else we need to mention regarding ease of use. It’s difficult to articulate exactly what the problem is here; the best we can come up with is ‘legacy’. You see, S60 is now so old and has grown organically over so many iterations and across so many platforms that it is now feeling decidedly disjointed. Every app (and we’re just talking about the native ones here not the 3rd party ones) feels slightly different to the last. You never get totally comfortable with the device as a whole because its individual parts don’t work as a whole. It looks and feels like what it is: a series of disparate applications written by different teams with different priorities. Compare that to the integrated, consistent UI of the iPhone and you have the equivalent of chalk and cheese. Nokia needs to take an urgent look at this. And by urgent we mean that no more devices should leave Espoo until this is addressed. Otherwise, they’ll continue to alienate customers.
Phone
Yes, that’s right folks, lest we forget the principle purpose of smartphones is still making and receiving calls. Here we happy to report that the N97 mini excelled. Clear call quality tends to be a given with Nokia devices but we also appreciated its other advantages over the iPhone: the ability to easily re-dial is one example that highlights the N97’s heritage as the product of a phone manufacturer rather than a computer manufacturer.
After phone calls, the next thing we use our phone for most is probably email. And how we love doing so on our iPhone. We get access to all of our MobileMe or Google Mail IMAP folders, clear, perfectly rendered HTML emails, and pretty darn close to ‘push’ delivery (i.e., it’s on the phone as quickly as it’s on our desktop email client). With the N97 mini? Not so much.
First, confusion reins because Nokia hasn’t bothered to properly integrate its latest stab at producing an email client: Nokia Messaging. So, you can choose to use that our stick to the built-in client. Neither is a happy experience.
- Nokia Messaging: There are two main problems with Nokia Messaging. Firstly, it’s unreliable. During our one week trial, there were two periods of 3-4 hours during which our mail just wasn’t delivered. Unacceptable. Secondly, despite what Nokia claims, it doesn’t render your mail in HTML properly. You often get pictures missing and the formatting is never quite right either. Thirdly, and most annoying to us, the client restricts you to seeing the last few days of email (at best you get the last month but we couldn’t get it to change its setting) and up to five of your IMAP folders. This is crazy. Nokia, what’s wrong with ALL our email and ALL our folders? Nowadays, with competition so strong, nothing else will do.
- Built-in client: Yes, you can still use the old built-in messaging client for email as well as texts and in some ways that the better way to go: it’s clunky but you get properly rendered HTML emails (it takes you to the Web browser to see them but OK) and you have access too all your IMAP folders. The downside, and on the N97 mini this is a big one, is that touch is not properly enabled. So, when you try to scroll you end up highlighting text in your email instead. Infuriating and yet another example of Nokia not being thorough enough in implementing touch properly.
The physical keyboard goes some way to redeeming the N97 mini. As we said above, it’s really rather excellent. But it can’t overcome the problems above,. So, when it comes to email, our iPhone wins hands down.
Web browsing
Nokia’s Web browser is very good from a functionality standpoint. It’s got nice shortcuts that Apple could learn from and we’re pleased to see that it opens by default in full screen mode on the N97 mini.
So, the problem with browsing on the N97 mini is not the software itself but rather the resistive screen. Far, far too often we found ourselves hitting links when we were in fact trying to scroll or vice versa. Scrolling is also very imprecise when compared to the iPhone. And please, don’t tell us that the resistive screen takes some getting used to because it’s a different technology. We know. We spent a week with this phone don’t forget. There are no two ways about it: capacitive isn’t different; it’s better. Without it, we’d rather stick to browsing on our non-touch N86.
Social media
We couln’t keep @TheProdigalFool and @ProdigalSix’s Twitter accounts so up-to-date with delicious Prodigal nonsense if we didn’t have Twittter clients on our phones.
We’re delighted to report that Gravity is available on the N97 mini and works as well as it does on non-touch S60 devices, eh, with one exception: yes, you guessed it: that damn screen. Scrolling our timeline become frustrating rather than a pleasure and it’s not Gravity’s fault, it’s the resistive screen’s.
Here’s the other thing though: good though Gravity is (and trust us, it’s one of the very best apps on S60), it’s still not as good in our view as Twitter clients for the iPhone like Tweetie 2 (our favourite) or TweetDeck. It lacks, for instance, the ability to switch between accounts while keeping a tweet open. (When, for example, you want to retweet something but as a different user).
While we’re talking social media, we should also give Nimbuzz an honourable mention. Sure it suffers from the screen too but it remains excellent. Then again, no better than the iPhone version…
Finally a quick note about Google Reader. We find ourselves doing most of our reading on our phones nowadays and a good Google Reader client is therefore crucial. On the iPhone we use Byline and simply love it. The N97 mini had GReader but we weren’t overly impressed. For one thing, it lacked embedded pictures. In the end, we relied on Gravity as the latest build includes Google Reader functionality for free and pretty good it is too.
Home screen
The N97 mini has what, on paper, sound like a great concept for a home screen: you set it up according to what information matters to you. You decide which widgets appear and in which order. And some of those widgets can pull information form the web in real-time. So, for example, you can choose to have the latest tweets in your timelines appear on the home screen below your friends’ Facebook status, below your upcoming appointments. Good stuff indeed. Except the execution is fatally flawed. There are three main problems:
- The web-widgets we tried – weather and Facebook – were unreliable: All too often they produced network errors or just went blank. Annoying and unnecessary. Even when out of range, the widget should simply show the last data it has.
- Very poor use of screen real-estate: The N97 mini has a decently screen resolution so we don’t understand how so little useful information can be viewed in these widgets. The Email one was a particular low point. You get one line for the name of your mailbox, then two lines of your latets mails. These rarely show the full name of the sender let alone the full subvject of the email because the font used is too large. Crazy. Oh, and in its infinite wisdom, Nokia made the widgets of fixed size so there’s no flexibility at all.
- You’re limited to four widgets: that’s right no multiple desktops and just four free widget slots mean you’re really going to have to concentrate to make this useful.
Having said all of that, at least the N97 mini tries. The iPhone doesn’t even bother; it has no home screen functionality at all. We love a useful home screen. So, until iPhone OS 40 comes along and fixes the problem, the N97 mini is the winner here.
PIM
The diary apps on the iPhone and N97 min are equally poor in our view so we’ll call that a draw. What gives the iPhone the advantage here is that we’re big GTD advocates and we couldn’t manage our hectic to-do list (spending on cars, spending on food, spending on gadgets…it can get on top of one!) without the help of a nifty app called Things on the iPhone. Well, try as we might, we couldn’t find a decent app for the N97 mini that worked according to GTD principles. Another win for the iPhone.
Media consumption
The sounds quality from the N97 mini’s music player was excellent through the supplied headphones. On a par, if not better than the iPhone (we hear the N97 mini has a separate sound-processing chip – it seems to have paid off). But that’s where the wins dry up for the N97 mini. You see, nowadays media consumption is as much about how you get media onto your device and manage it as anything else. And here Apple has another colossal advantage in the form of iLife. We have all of our music, photos and videos already stored in iTunes and iPhoto. When we plug our iPhone in, it all gets seamlessly transferred. The N97 mini has Nokia’s Media Sync but it just can’t compete either in speed or ease of use. Sorry, but another – albeit narrow – win for the iPhone.
Navigation
At last a clear win for the N97 mini! Until last week, we might have been tempted to give this one to the iPhone – it’s Google Maps app is also available for the N97 mini by the way – but that was before Nokia announced fee turn-by-turn navigation form its Ovi Maps app.
This is a very clever marketing decision by Nokia and a clear differentiator. Ovi Maps worked very well in our tests and although we have some reservations about the search database, we would happily use it as our sole navigation aid.
Capturing photos and video
While the N97 mini is on a roll, let’s give it another win. Its photo and video capture our definitely better than the iPhone’s thanks in no small part to its excellent, Carl Zeiss-sourced, optics. We’re not talking N86 good but good nonetheless. If we had to be critical, we’d ask why Nokia didn’t put an 8MP shooter in here so N95 users felt like they were getting an upgrade rather than – literally – the same old thing, but listen, the 5mp unit that’s there is really as good as most people would need.
App store
Nowadays you can’t review a device without at least mentioning its associated app store. We hear that Nokia is on the verge of unveiling a revamped version of its Ovi Store. It can’t come a moment too soon. The one that’s there now is slow, unreliable (we lost count of the number of errors we got) and just plain ugly (green Nokia, really!?). No, sorry Noks, but Apple beats you to it again on this front.
Conclusion
The N97 mini can’t quite steal the iPhone’s crown. Nokia’s disjointed approach to software design and its arrogantly slow pace of innovation (that silly screen) put paid to that.
But this is an infuriating result because we so wanted to love the N97 mini and, had it not been for that screen and some of the more inexcusable software issues (the email app being the principle one) we could have so easily done so. It’s so, so, close to being a great device. But it stumbles at the last couple of hurdles.
Indeed, if we had never tried an iPhone, maybe we’d be hailing the N97 mini as a contender but the problem is we have. And so have millions of others. So, we just can’t see how anyone would chose the frustrations of the N97 mini over the pleasures of an iPhone.
As for Nokia, we remain convinced that it is capable of greatness. The N900 shows enormous promise but isn’t there yet. But the guys in Espoo need to make some pretty big changes and quick if they’re going to catch up in the high-end smartphone market. Lest anyone forgets, Apple is likely to announce iPhone 4.0 tomorrow and that’s sure to set the benchmark even higher again.
We’ve off to pen a letter to Ollie-Pekka Kallasvuo with our thoughts. Look out for it on the site soon.
In the meantime, we think that the N86 remains the best phone Nokia currently makes.
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