Nokia N97 Mini Price Drop: Clearing Way for New Device?

Home > Nokia N97 Mini Price Drop: Clearing Way for New Device?

By Mike Browne on March 18,

2010 at 00:00,

The Nokia N97 Mini is a little less than six months old but it seems to have already come in for a price drop over at Nokia Online. Could Nokia be clearing the decks ready for a new high-end touchscreen device? Read on to find out about the Nokia N97 Mini price drop and what that means for Nokia bargain hunters…

When the Nokia N97 Mini launched back in November of last year, you could pick it up at Nokia Online for £429 (inc. VAT) SIM free and open to be used by any carrier you wished. Then in December came the Nokia N97 Mini Comes With Music Edition, which was essentially the same smartphone but with access to the eight million plus tracks that now make up Nokia Music and yours to download for free.

We’ve just been having a mooch around and it seems the Nokia N97 Mini now costs just £389 (inc. VAT) SIM free while the Nokia N97 Mini Comes With Music has had a similar price drop of £50 to just £489 (inc. VAT), which is a pretty amazing discount.

So what, you may ask, it is nearly six months old so due a discount. Sure, but the same level of discount hasn’t happened with other touchscreen devices, as the Nokia 5800 and Nokia N97 are still very much at the same price.

The question we asked ourselves is, 'does this means we’ll be seeing some pretty neat touchscreen with a QWERTY keyboard swooping in to pick up where the Nokia N97 Mini left off?' Well, there is the Nokia C6 to consider, which looks like an entry-level version of the N97 Mini or could some other device be looming?

Could Nokia be about to announce a new high-end touchscreen device, hopefully packing in the Symbian^3 OS or could we be about to get a consumer Maemo or MeeGo device? Let us know what you think, or even what you’d like to see, in the Comments below.

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GolAccio

I’ve got an iPhone 3GS currently and I really would love to go back to Nokia this year, I’ve been using Nokia cell-phones since I was 16, over a decade now. I hope they create a more user friendly version of Maemo, and stick it on a capacative touch device with multi-touch (seriously, this pretty much negates the need for a physical keyboard), also ditch the cheap plastic and use some better quality materials (I don’t want to spend £500 on a lump of plastic), and I’m pretty certain Nokia will be onto a winner. Also I would like Nokia to put in some decent hardware, last years N97 was incredibly over-priced for such a low powered phone (one of the reasons I got a 3GS, experienced absolutely 0 slowdown and 0 crashes since last June). I’m heading over to the Nokia Conversations blog too lol.

A powerful phone with an open OS is the way to go, as much as I like my iPhone 3GS, I’m a firm believer in this, I think Nokia are the only ones capable of pulling this off, Android is fine, but I have a serious problem with Google’s almost total domination of the mobile internet and don’t think it’s particularly healthy (almost 100% control of mobile search, even the iPhone has Google search as a default, and 2 google products on the homescreen, i.e. youtube and google maps).

Oh and Firefox on a mobile is the greatest thing ever, which is I have big hopes for Nokia and Maemo this year.