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

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 29 May 2007 04:32

Your IT - Mobility

Using the N95 as a phone, with occasional use of the camera or mp3 player and other features doesn’t rapidly drain the battery to zero, and indeed, the N95 can last for many hours some time with light use.

But if you start heavily using streaming media or video download features while you listen to music, surf the web, take photos and videos and use the GPS as well, in addition to making lots of phone calls, you will drain the battery.

As such, it’s advisable to have a car charger adapter, especially if you plan to use the GPS feature a lot and have the N95 set to leave the backlight on when navigating. Having a charger at work to complement the one you have at home is handy as well, as this way, you should almost never be out of power, especially if you plan for heavy use throughout the day. Recharge times are fast, too, or at least seemed so, which is a bonus.

In Australia, Nokia is shipping the N95 with a 1Gb microSD memory card, something almost unheard of in the cell phone industry. This was immediately replaced with a 2Gb card (the maximum size the N95 is compatible with), with the 1Gb card relegated to the SD carrying case and placed in my pocket for use if needed to record extended video clips. You can record one continuous hour of video at a time, and at the quality, it’s pretty impressive.

So far, after using the N95 for over a month, there is no question that the N95 is the best phone we’ve ever used. As previously stated, it’s a constant companion, and in my hands get relatively heavy usage of many of its features on a daily basis.

The N95 isn’t perfect – it could be a bit faster, although the version 11 firmware markedly sped up the N95 over the initial version 10 firmware, so there’s hope the N95 can be made even faster. Some of the buttons on the front of the N95 can be easy to press by accident, meaning you’re in the middle of one function, to suddenly find yourself in Nokia’s smooth and Vista like ‘circular menu’, or are back to the main standby screen.

But thankfully, all is not lost, just press the ‘menu’ key and quickly navigate back to the function you were using, and you’re back to where you were. A few weeks of constant use of the phone has made my fingers much more aware of where the buttons are, although occasional keypresses still see me sometimes popping into an unintended function.

Before we conclude, it's worth briefly mention the Nokia PC Suite. Years ago, this software was a bit flaky, but plenty of sync programs for mobile phones were the same back in the day. Fast forward to today, and the Nokia PC Suite software that connects your N95 (or other Nokia phone) is rock solid.

Once connected, whether by USB cable, infrared or Bluetooth, you can fully back up your phone, composes and send SMS messages on your computer, see your phone's SMS and other message inboxes on your computer screen, edit, add and delete phone contacts, transfer photos, transfer video clips, connect to the Internet through your phone (using it as a wireless broadband modem), transfer music and even update the firmware over the Internet, without needing to take your phone into a service centre first - although don't forget to back up your phone first, as you are strongly reminded, or you will lose your data. Nokia's PC Suite is sync software that works very well.

So... although the iPhone looms as a spectacularly amazing smartphone in its own right, and is a phone I and many others have coveted even more than the N95, the reality is that the iPhone won’t land on Australian or European shores until sometime in 2008, making it a non-starter for many until it is actually available.

In many respects the N95 does everything the iPhone does, except with a smaller memory capacity and no touch screen component. While US citizens might be able to get an iPhone in late June, I’ve got an N95 now, and am happily making much use of its many and varied functions and features, at 3G and 3.5G speeds far faster than the iPhone’s EDGE is capable of delivering.

There’s no doubt the iPhone will be a force to be reckoned with, but Nokia certainly have not been asleep at the wheel. The N95 is Nokia’s finest phone ever, and is but the latest version in the ever evolving N-Series line of ‘multimedia computers’.

We can but only expect that the N95’s successor in a year’s time will be even slimmer, take even higher quality photos and videos, further refine the interface and controls, lock onto GPS satellites faster, offer a bigger screen, more inbuilt memory and plenty of other features.

But all of that is in the future. For now, Nokia’s N95 is Nokia’s true communications and computing device of the early 21st century, with even better still yet to come. The iPhone will get an avalanche of press following its launch in a few weeks time, but with the N95, Nokia has a phone that is quite possibly the iPhone’s best, and so far only, real competitor.