Nokia’s N95: the real iPhone killer? - Update

By Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 29 May 2007 05:32

Your IT - Mobility

The Nokia N95 is also an Outlook compatible organizer, a note taker, a voice recorder, a calculator, can run lots of programs that can be downloaded from the net, free or paid, like a computer, a blogging tool, a games console, a YouTube player (using a special beta player) and, amazingly enough, even more, including packing in Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP, Wi-Fi b/g, infrared, a standard mini-USB port (joy of joys) and quad-band GSM. It even comes with a snazzy leather case that protects the screen while giving access to all the N95 inputs.

Although a number of other phones on the market could claim most, if not all of the same features, although at different levels of 'quality', Nokia’s implementation in the N95 hits the jackpot. The N95 uses the solid and familiar Series 60 Symbian operating system, and as a mature platform, is able to handle multitasking with ease, although you will need to shut down programs you’re no longer using if you try to open too many at the same time.

It offers a raft of high end features and top notch connectivity along with useful new additions such as inbuilt GPS navigation (which does require a separate fee if turn-by-turn voice navigation is required, although all mapping, GPS positioning and more, including maps, are able to be used free of charge, worldwide), mean that the N95 truly is a multimedia computer, and not just as simple mobile cell phone.

Granted, it doesn’t have the 3.5-inch multitouch screen of the iPhone or its touch only control system, with the N95 not sporting a touch screen at all, nor is it as thin, with the N95 looking more like a slim Canon, Sony or Casio ‘credit card sized’ digital camera, but after using the N95 and all of its features, with great success, the N95 truly has become an indispensable companion.

Reading web sites with a full HTML browser is a joy, with pages rendering as they’re supposed to, and even more joy of joys, the text formatting itself to fit into the the Nokia’s 2.6-inch LCD screen, making the reading of web pages a breeze. Yes, you need to scroll around the page sometimes, but compared with phone browsers of the past, Nokia’s browser is a breath of fresh air for mobile devices, looking set to only be bested by the Safari browser on the iPhone, and Opera on the Pocket PC platform.

Taking quality photos on the N95 is also a revelation, given the relatively poor quality of camera phone photos up until now. The N95 does take three or four seconds to save the photo once you’ve taken it, making it a tad slower than a real digital camera, but not really by all that much.

The DVD-like video recording at a resolution of 640x480 is also a vast leap from the quality of most competing camera phones, and while it’s not actual DVD resolution, playback looks fantastic on the N95’s screen and quite decent when viewed on a TV.

The mp3 and video playback works well too, with music organised much as you'd see on an iPod. The main music menu offers songs, artists, albums, genres, playlists and a shuffle feature, comes with an equalizer, a couple of basic visualisations (although we wish there were snazzier ones to download free from Nokia's website, which sadly isn't the case as yet, perhaps a future firmware update will jazz them up a bit), album covers, an 'add to playlist' function and more.

The mp3 player is very capable, so it's surprising to discover it has one flaw: it doesn't support gapless playback, or at least, not yet. Complaints have arisen online, with users hoping a future firmware update will fix the problem, although for the time being, gaps in between individual tracks are the state of affairs, affecting any album where songs flow from one track to the next, unbroken. 

We can forgive this, given the rest of the N95's amazing features, and given the public consensus is that they want this feature and that it's theoretically fixable in a future firmware update, the likelihood this will end up being so makes us happier to put up with it for now.  

So, when listening to mp3s, video and other audio, you can do it with the built-in stereo speakers, which can go quite loud, but more likely you'll either be using your own pair of headphones or the N95 remote control and separate pair of headphones in the box. Both units sport a 3.5mm headphone jack, as the N95 has a standard 3.5mm headphone socket. This means you can use any headphones you like with the N95, just as you can with an iPod or Walkman.

When using headphones directly plugged into the N95, you just speak into the phone’s microphone instead, solving the problem of what to do when your headphones don’t have an inline microphone. Better still, plug your headphones into the included remote control, which can clip to your lapel, and the microphone is in there, picking up your voice clearly even if the N95 is in your pocket.

The N95 also comes with a 3.5mm plug to video and audio cable, with the standard three plugs on the other end for your TV, with yellow for composite video, and white and red for stereo audio. Plugging the N95 into your TV lets you view the N95 experience on the big screen, whether in landscape or portrait format, as the N95 with its unique dual sliding mechanism effortlessly lets you switch into either mode.

Demonstrating the N95’s features to a group of people is even better when viewed on TV, and the cable has allowed me to take the phone to people’s places, plug it into their TV and listen to my music collection or share video clips with ease. It’s a much loved feature, and we can only hope the iPhone can do the same.

The GPS feature works surprisingly well. Because the N95 only has a less battery hungry SIRFStar II chip inside for GPS navigation, instead of the power hungry but faster SIRFStar III chip, locking onto at least three satellites can take anywhere from 30 seconds to 5 minutes, but once you’ve got a lock, it seems to stay solid.

The GPS navigation feature seems to work as well as any other, once or twice it places us on a street parallel to the one we were actually on, but it soon figured out the mistake and had us back in the right location.

So, what else is there to know about the battery life? What are some other features of the N95 that we didn't like? And is it a true iPhone killer? Please read onto page 3 for the conclusion!