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.

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My Jaiku Nokia N95 arrived today and obviously I had to make some nice unwrapping pictures. The package arrived within one day from Finland, which is strangely much faster than most normal packages here in the UK. Jyri had pre-installed version 0.49 of the Jaiku Mobile Client for me so I could directly start using Jaiku, but my Dutch GPRS doesn’t get recognized properly by the Series60 software. So, for now I don’t have a review of the Jaiku software as I will have to wait for my housemate to get back to help me with this.

Although the phone is quite a bit heavier and larger than my Sony Ericsson K610i, I do think I like it. Especially the combination of Wifi and GPS make it a very nice all-in-one device. I already managed to get Fring working on it, which means I can make Skype calls over Wifi wherever I have Wifi access. I can’t wait to use Fring on all those open Wifi networks out there like for example in The Apple Store Regent Street.

I also tried the built-in Flickr upload tool to upload a photo taken with the 5MP camera (see below). I think the quality of the camera is pretty good, and in combination with my Nikon D40 this camera is ideal for when I don’t want/dare to take my D40 out of my bag. Maybe it is a nice I idea to have a Flickr badge on this site with “live” images from events where I am at.

I still have to figure out 50% of the features and settings for two reasons. First off the manuals that were provided were in Scandinavian, and second I haven’t installed any Nokia software because I am using a Mac. Anyone know how the soon to be released firmware update for the N95 (as I was informed by an insider) can be installed on a Mac?

Summary (for now):

Pros

• Wifi
• GPS
• Skype over Wifi or HDSPA
• Acceptable 5Mp camera
• Nokia has recently released some nice iSync plugins

Cons

• Weird GPRS configuration
• Very big Media Button that gets pressed too quickly
• Too many buttons! (definitely not an iPhone)
• The Flickr username/password for the upload tool is not your normal username/password

In the end I am very thankful to Jaiku for awarding me this phone, and I think I am now even more a Jaiku fan.

I know that I already posted twice today, but something happened just a few minutes ago that made me very happy. I won the Nokia N95 in the Jaiku Survey 3000. Jaiku held a survey with which you could win a Nokia N95, and they kept their lottery publicly in their support channel (#jaiku). Funny enough they let any Jaiku member present pick a number between 1 and 555, after which they revealed the corresponding email address. I was the first one to respond with the number 29. Obviously the number was not attached to my email, but the second Nokia N95 was awarded to me for being the first one to call out a number.

Together with my free FON router it really feels like it’s Christmas. Everyone around me (especially Alper) has been talking about the N95 for weeks and now I am the one to have one. So soon you can expect video blogging, photo blogging and a full N95 review on this site. I don’t even know what to expect but GPS and WIFI sound really cool. Does anyone know if this phone can solve my Flickr GPS issue?

Thank you very much Jaiku!