Rumors regarding the Nokia N97 mini emerged a while ago when a Vodafone forum moderator posted about the existence of such a device. Sadly! he was fired for leaking out such sensitive information, but that only led us to believe that Nokia did have such a device in the works.

And today! a leaked photo of the supposed Nokia N97 mini is what adds more to our speculation about the existence of such a device.

From what we see, it has a smaller touchscreen, a Qwerty keyboard but with a missing D-pad as seen on the original N97. Also the N97 mini is said to have only 8GB of storage memory, whereas the original N97 has 32GB of storage memory.

Though we personally believe that its nothing but an early prototype of the Nokia N97 which could have changed during the design-phase to give out the actual and final device.

Another possibility is that perhaps Nokia wants to repeat its trend by releasing a budget-phone as a supplementary to the original one, like it did with earlier with the Nokia E71. Though we doubt it, as N97 already failed to meet most of the users expectations.