Launched at last: Nokia's N95 8GB strikes back at iPhone

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 16 October 2007 16:50

Your IT - Mobility

The N95 8GB is what the N95 should have been in the first place. There are improvements that can be made – it’s still too easy to press the red ‘hang up’ button and return to the main menu when you’re in the middle of deleting text when typing on the keyboard. Even more battery life would be good, but battery technology is really what needs to improve here.

Having touch capabilities similar to the iPhone to sweep through photos or web pages would be great to see. Even larger memory, a thinner profile, a 10 megapixel camera, 1024x768 video recording at better than 30fps, the return of a MicroSD card with ‘HC’ high capacity capabilities which are supposed to top out at 32GB before a newer standard will be required (as the MicroSD slot was removed from the N95 8GB model) and the return of the camera lens cap, also removed from the N95 8GB – nothing wrong with a mechanism to keep the lens safer!

No doubt these features and many more are all on the drawing board, probably already in prototype form. In terms of features and usability, the N95 8GB ranks as the most advanced mobile phone on the planet, but has to share that spot with the iPhone.

As an iPhone and N95 owner, I’m keenly aware of each model’s strengths and weakenesses. The iPhone still represents a true 21st century leap in interface design and use. Nokia has shown that its future models will offer similar capabilities to the iPhone, but the key difference is that the iPhone is available now.

By the same token, the N95 8GB offers features and capabilities the iPhone cannot, and won’t until future versions. The N95 8GB will be highly popular, just as the iPhone, and comes just in time for the Christmas/end-of-year gift giving season.

Perhaps this year’s best gift is an iPhone – or iPod touch – and a N95 8GB, to get the best of both worlds. Those 5 megapixel photos the N95 takes look great on the iPhone’s screen – much better than those of the iPhone’s 2 megapixel camera, with no camera at all on the current iPod touch models – although surely the future holds higher megapixel cameras for future iPhones, too.

The N95 8GB is the new top-end model Nokia needed to release at about this time to strike back at all their competitors, not just Apple, with the promise of even better models to come, spurring all phone manufacturers to life their game and deliver even better phones and portable computing devices in 2008 and beyond.

While both the N95 8GB and the iPhone will sell strongly in Q4 07, with the actual sales figures to come early next year no doubt keenly awaited by all, both phones make it more obvious than ever before that when it comes to technology – the next few years will show us that we ain’t seen nothin’ yet!