Nokia N97 Mini Gets Early Review: Awful Keyboard

We knew the Nokia N97 Mini was only mildly smaller than its full-sized sibling, but Mobile-Review's Eldar Murtazin has – thanks to his early access to the QWERTY smartphone – confirmed it with a full review.  Unfortunately for Nokia, he's not impressed: a combination of insufficient price differentiation between the N97 Mini and the N97, mediocre looks and, most damning, a keyboard that's actually worse than that of the original add up to a handset that's yet to answer the original question of "why bother?"

In fact the keyboard is described as only remaining so as to retain the family resemblance, which is a pretty poor reason in our opinion.  Meanwhile the internal memory takes a dive from 32GB to 8GB, and Eldar's shot of the N97 Mini next to the N900 leaves us wondering why we should bother being interested in the former considering the similarity in sizes.

What's more promising is that Murtazen has at least one more touchscreen Nokia device that he has to preview ahead of Nokia World next week, together with the news that the company "is preparing a bunch of other touchscreen-enabled phones".  Some of these, he suggests, will be real rivals to the N97 Mini; we're hoping we get to play with them when SlashGear goes to Nokia World next week.