This weekend I saw at a very good friend two very nice Nokia phones and I literally confiscated them for the weekend to play a bit with them and see how well they still perform in 2024. Initially, I thought they were the same phone, but it doesn’t take long to see how different the two of them are. One of them is a Nokia N97 and the other is the N97 mini.

Unfortunately, the N97’s screen seems to be busted, as the phone seems to be working fine, but the display is dead, nothing appearing on it, and even the backlight not working. I blame the display cable which might worn out from too many openings and didn’t last the test of time.

Except from the design particularity, where the screen pops out, the phone feels strong. It’s not as robust as the N900, but it’s certainly a good Nokia from back in the day. Similarly to the N900, the phone has a user-replaceable battery (as in “take the lid off and pop in a new battery”), a physical two-position camera shutter button, to make you feel that you’re taking photographs, not instasnaps, and a quite decent keyboard (the N97 has an AZERTY version, hon hon hon). It also has a 3.5mm audio jack, so even in 2024, this can be used as a pretty solid music machine. One really interesting thing I discovered when I put the phones to charge and can be seen in the side-by-side photos, is that the micro-USB port on the N97 mini is inverted for some reason.

The camera is pretty decent and it takes good photos, as shown below. Update: I took some photos using the N97 mini and somehow they all disappeared when I tried to download them to my computer. I think there are some permissions errors with the directory associated to saving the images. Why do I think it’s that? Well, I changed the date from the defaul 01/01/2010 to the current date and now the camera app crashes after taking a photo. I managed to download a video that was already on the phone, filmed by the previous owners, which looks pretty nice, I’ll just add some screencaps of that.

Being powered by Symbian, there are a ton of apps that one can add, and the physical keyboard makes this a mean texting (or Terminal) machine, so it still could be used as that.

I won’t talk too much about tech specs, they can always be found on GSM Arena: N97 at GSMArena • N97 mini at GSMArena. Additionally, the Mobile Phone Museum has great insights on the N97 and the N97 mini.

If you’re interested in these little two jewels, here’s a short list of nice articles about them: