RedBoard video: Nokia’s Magical “Mini” bus tour

By: calendar iconJuly 26th, 2010 a 3:50pm

You may have seen a big blue Nokia-branded RV pass through your area recently.

You likely couldn’t miss it. It’s decked out with a giant image of the Nokia N97 Mini and just concluded a three week cross-Canada trek from Vancouver to Toronto, via Banff, Calgary, Montreal and Ottawa, sharing the location on Nokia’s Ovi Maps.

Affectionately called the Nokia N97 Mini tour, the RV was the eye candy of a promotional event for Nokia’s latest smartphone which launched a few weeks ago and is available exclusively at Rogers.

On the final leg of the tour in Toronto, I had a chance to catch up with Anurag Thakur, Nokia’s Senior Business Development Manager and Andrew Currie, one of the Mini tour roadtrippers.  As part of our RedBoard video series, we talk about some of the features of the N97 Mini and get the inside scoop on the Mini tour.

Did you see the Nokia N97 Mini tour as it passed through your area? What do you think of Nokia’s latest smartphone?

Miranda MacDonald is a regular contributor to RedBoard.

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  1. davidm says: July 26th, 2010 a 8:13pm

    Nokia makes some great hardware, and Symbian OS is pretty good, but they’ve unfortunately failed miserably on the application layer and getting together a marketplace. Making things look good is not a last second process, it has to be deep and from the ground up. Nokia’s problem (although currently their success) is they are very successful around the world through having many product lines. Unfortunately the product lines are all incompatible with each other, and as inside videos have revealed, they will intentionally harm one product, leave out essential features, in order to provide artificial delineations between products.

    Their saving grace could be their Linux based devices, which are open and extremely powerful, but they’re also very geeky and jumping the geeky/usable barrier is one of the hardest things to do. Android has done it, at the cost of some openness.

    Handsets are jumping the barrier so even the cheapest will soon be a phone, computer, media player, camera, you name it — more connected and functional than today’s computer (Though not as brute-force powerful), Android and iPhone are the best choices today for this function. Whether Nokia will make it to this next generation is an open question.

  2. Simon Sage says: July 27th, 2010 a 11:16am

    Superstar bloggers? Baaaaah…

    Also, awesome shirt, Andrew.

  3. rei says: July 28th, 2010 a 2:46pm

    For example, you can tell the amount of excitement by the lack of comments. The N97 is a failure.

  4. Dave says: July 28th, 2010 a 9:52pm

    I totally agree with rei. I fell for the false promises made in promotional videos for N97 and wasted $700 on one. “not enough memory for update.Delete some data and try again “.

    • RogersMiranda says: July 29th, 2010 a 9:35am

      Hi Rei and Dave,

      Just wanted to clarify that the device that is exclusive to Rogers and the one featured in the tour was the Nokia N97 Mini, not the Nokia N97.

      • Dave says: July 29th, 2010 a 10:58pm

        Sorry Miranda, just thought they both have same amount of Ram 128mb which is far too small for a “SmartPhone”. Currently I am using HTC Desire on Rogers with 576 mb ram and having no low memory problems. Amazing phone!

  5. davidm says: July 29th, 2010 a 9:34am

    Come on Rogers, we don’t want any more feature phone style devices. We want devices with a modern, consistent UI and apps that work across generations of devices, that also has a great camera, battery life and complete feature set. Especially if we have to commit for two years. Please release a leading edge Android handset with keyboard.

  6. John M says: July 29th, 2010 a 9:53pm

    I bought an N97 mini from puremobile since it was $50 less than the no-contract Rogers version and is of course already unlocked. I love it- was able to easily transfer all of my hundreds of contacts, calendar, note and web bookmarks from my E71; with the recent addition of SBC mobile shell I have much of the functionality of an android phone stuffed with parsimonious Symbian apps and a great phone, a SUPERB phone, hardware-wise. Ovi Store is nothing remotely as cool as the Apple app store or Android Market, but it has much of what I need, and there are also dozens of places to get symbian apps and easily transfer them to my phone via my phone’s web or from my computer via bluetooth file transfer.

    I’m really happy with my phone and happy to see Rogers selling it. Now let’s get the N8!