I already did a small review of the new Nokia N95 last week, but today I will be going into some more detail about what makes the N95 “tick”. The first day I had my N95, I played around trying to get Jaiku working over GPRS, and then I installed Fring to be able to use Skype over the Wifi. Obviously all this tinkering quickly drained the battery so here is a more detailed overview of “what computers have become”.

Battery Life (+)

One complaint of some reviewers is the battery life of the N95, but both I and another N95 owner noticed that this is probably only an issue in the first week because this is when you are playing around with all the functions. Once you start using the phone as a phone, and only occasionally use the display/video/GPS/wifi capabilities, the battery life is actually very acceptable. For me, even when using a lot of wifi, the battery life ranges from 1 to 1.5 days .

GPS (+/-)

The built-in GPS receiver is what sets the N95 apart from the other Nokia N-series phones. Unfortunately the GPS receiver is of really bad quality, and the antenna is located in the keypad, so for reception you will have to slide open the screen. In the first days I couldn’t manage to get a fix, but I recently noticed that if you stand still under a blue sky, it is able to make a fix on your position within a minute or two. This isn’t quite quick enough to solve my GPS issue, but it is fun.

Amazingly though, once you do have a fix, it really manages to keep track of your position. Even in places (half inside a building for example) where you would not get an initial fix at all. I did notice some inaccuracy here and there but in the end it does it’s job. The software provided is pretty detailed and uses internet (wifi, GPRS, UMTS or other) to download your maps. I manually zoomed in to the London area once and that was enough to never again run out of cached maps. A nice addition is the built-in search engine for finding interesting places (hotels, restaurants, etc) in your current area.

Wifi (++)

The wifi on the N95 is simply brilliant. It has full 802.11g spec wifi so I don’t slow down my router when I connect. This was a real problem with my PSP which had 802.11b which would throttle down all channels in my router back to B. The internet on the N95 is very useful, both for browsing, checking GMail, reading RSS (see image on the right) or letting other applications connect to the internet. As I said before, I managed to get Fring working over wifi so wherever I find a hotspot I can make a phone call.

The built-in browser is based on the same foundation (WebKit) as the Safari browser on Mac OS X and it is quite ok. Instead of giving you some strange version of a website, like some portable browsers do, it actually shows the entire page as you would see on your PC. MiniMaps help you browse around on big pages and the predictive text (T9) makes it really easy to enter information. Personally I could have done with a full keyboard or a touchscreen, but the device is already quite well equipped. I guess they had to make some compromises somewhere.

Memory (+/-)

This section is about two things: RAM memory and storage memory. Just as most of the previous models, Nokia managed to give this device way too little free ram. When the whole OS is running, there is only 21 MB of RAM left. I have already encountered some moments that I had to close one application (most of the time Fring) before I could open another one. It is just sad that they couldn’t have equipped this multimedia machine with a bit more of that which all multimedia machines love: RAM.

For storage the N95 comes with 160MB of free internal memory, but this is clearly not enough if you want to use the camera and the video capabilities. I ordered a 2GB MicroSD via Ebay which provides for enough space to save music, photos and even the occasional video. MicroSD can be purchased pretty cheap in Hong Kong via Ebay (around £15) so there is no reason not to buy that extra memory.

Symbian (-)

Now we are getting in the dangerous area where I might go “OS X rulez!”, so please forgive me if I compare everything with Mac OS X and the iPhone because I just can’t help it. The Symbian Series 60 v3.1 OS that is provided with the N95 is just a pain in the ass. I used to have a Palm Z31 handheld and the S60 OS feels a lot like the Palm OS as it has many of the same issues: lack of memory, strange file management, settings everywhere, not using the existing desktop paradigm, etc.

As I noted before, the memory management is very unstable as I don’t think they use a swap file. Furthermore the OS is based on a *nix shell but somehow the internal memory is on C:/ and the external memory is on E:/. The OS has several locations where you can find settings, but because they can be only found in one place it is impossible to find some settings. As a “bonus” there are so many tools installed that they’ve lost track of what a user really needs: simplicity. I really foresee a great future for the iPhone here (simply from a usability perspective) if Apple manages to give the user a simple interface.

As an extra reliability issue I think I managed to crash the phone into a reboot about 10 times in one week, but I received some news from an inside source saying that Nokia will soon be releasing a new firmware to solve this problem.

Multimedia (++)

One thing is true about the N95: it is a multimedia MONSTER. I am quite a multimedia addict, so I bought my 2Gb of extra ram for a good reason. The SD card is currently hosting a lot of music, video, and even (video) podcasts. I am a real podcast junky (I love TWiT, Macbreak, and Net@Nite) so I was amazed to see a real podcast option built into the phone. The N95 allows you to subscribe to podcasts and directly download them to the phone. An iPod doesn’t even support direct download and I don’t think it is planned for the iPhone. This feature really made me happy, but I did notice that you have to pick the right feeds as the N95 is not fast enough to play any High Definition material.

Besides consuming media I like to actually make my own media, and I was surprised to see the quality of the built-in camera. With a 5MP camera and a Carl Zeiss Optics lens the quality of both photo and video is just amazing. The color of the camera is a bit off and there is no manual white-balance, but at least the resolution and quality are there to be able to fix it in post production. The amount of (or rather lack of) noise makes it a very good portable companion for my Nikon D40. I posted some sample photos to Flickr, and even a quick video on my own site. Note that I managed to upload some of the photos directly from the mobile including the Geo-tags.

Jaiku (-)

One of the big applications I would have liked to be able to run on my N95 was Jaiku. These nice guys actually gave me the phone and installed the Jaiku mobile client on it for me, but somehow I couldn’t get it to work. The reason is that Jaiku only works over GPRS or UMTS and not over wifi. I currently use my Dutch sim card in the N95 which does have a GPRS dataplan, but somehow the configuration doesn’t seem to work on the N95. I removed Jaiku after a few days, mainly because I realized that using GPRS with my Dutch sim in the UK is extremely expensive.

There are rumors that the next Jaiku client will support wifi, which would mean that I could use it. I actually would lalso ike to sell my old Dutch contract (16 months left) but somehow I don’t think anyone will ever buy it from me. For now I just have to go to the Jaiku site using the built-in browser and update my Jaiku like that (works quite ok).

Applications (++)

One of the things that the Series 60 OS has that the iPhone (for now) won’t have is the ability to run these 3rd party applications like Jaiku, Fring, Shozu (GPS photo tagging and uploading) and GMail. I think I haven’t even scratched the surface of the amount of applications available for the N95 as I haven’t even tried the Office utilities that have been provided with the phone. Although the Series 60 v3.1 is fairly new, most of the old applications either seem to work or will be updated soon. There are even some nice tools like POCKETbliin that are trying to exploit the built-in GPS to create new social services.

Conclusion

In the end I am very pleased with this phone, even though I am a real Sony fanboy when it comes to mobile phones. The Nokia N95 is a very all-round multimedia gadget. If you want to have all the multimedia functions (music, video, podcasts, camcorder, photo camera) you will ever need in one device, and you have the money, then I think the Nokia N95 is a very good investment. If you only want to have a good cameraphone, I think it might be a bit over budget. I must say that in time I started to like the N95 a lot, mostly because I kept discovering new features. I do wonder if this would have been different if I had payed for the phone. If you are buying this phone (€700/£470/$800 retail price) you will be having certain expectations and therefore I would advice buyers not to expect too much of the power of the OS and the GPS capabilities. The only good reason to buy the Nokia N95 is simple: multimedia.
Rated as 4/5 on May 03 2007 by Cristiano Betta

LouderVoice Review Tags: N95, Mobile, Symbian

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 at 23:05 and is filed under Jaiku, N95, gadget, media, mobile, review, video.