Posted on Monday 13th of October 2008 at 16:01 in Reviews

Review: Nokia N95 3G Mobile Phone

Around a year ago I broke my marvelous XDA Orbit PDA-phone mid-contract and had to negotiate a new phone out of my network. They agreed to send me a Nokia N95 3G phone for the remainder of my contract which was a welcome twist, as I'd not owned a Nokia for many years (having gone through two PDA-phones).

The advantage of the Nokia is that if you've used one before (and almost everyone has) then you can pick them up. Their O/S is always stable and the controls remain consistent across almost all of their devices and that makes them a sensible purchase. Nokia seldom do "bad" phones, but they don't always make "good" ones. The N73 was an appalling device, crashing every time you dared try to take a picture... So I was curious to see how the N95 would fair.

Not touchscreen
The last two devices I owned were both touchscreen, so to use one that wasn't was a welcome break. Writing a text message by hand using a stylus is pretty cool but ultimately very annoying - certainly not something you can achieve on an underground train. Nokias use the keypad and predictive text - something I'd not used since I was 18 (5 years ago now). It's easy to use and pretty intuitive.

Screen
The screen is actually pretty decent, more than enough for watching video on your own, although the definition isn't as high as an iPod touch or the iPhone. The colours are pretty clear and video translates well (more on that later).

Photo and Video
The camera on the device is excellent and comfortably the best on any phone I've encountered. The claim is 5-megapixels which shouldn't be listened to - the device won't take a picture comparable to an entry-level 5mp camera, but it's comfortably better than the entry level cameras of yester-year. Video taken from the device isn't bad and certainly sufficient for user-generated video sites such as Youtube, but I wouldn't consider using it as my only means of recording an event.

Media Support and Playback
Encoding video files for the N95 is a pain but once you've found the right combination of resolution, bit-rate and audio-rate the N95 is an excellent phone for media. Sliding the phone in the opposite direction to the keypad presents a new set of keys:



This allows for easy media control and the video is played back in widescreen, which is also great.

Internet and connectivity
The Internet on Nokia devices sucks. It's WAP on the most part which is the teletext of the mobile world; we want proper mobile browsers (like Opera) and decent connection speeds. The Internet is almost unusable on the N95, but that comes from someone who has spent the past 4 years on touchscreen PDA-phones. I expect full web browsing rather than this diluted version that appears on most mobile phones.

GPS and Nokia Maps
My biggest complaint with the N95 is from the claim that it has a "GPS" device. It does, but it's awful. My XDA Orbit had an excellent GPS receiver internal to the device which allowed for swift global positioning and the prospect of having integrated satelite navigation software loaded on the phone. The Nokia N95 claims to have this but really doesn't. The GPS receiver is so weak that unless you're sitting outside, stationary for 20 minutes you have little-to-no chance of locating yourself. Which is a big problem, because you'll typically want to locate yourself in a timely fashion.

Secondly, Nokia Maps is possibly the worst application posing as a navigation assistant ever created. In default format it relies on the painfully slow Internet connection provided by the N95 to download maps on demand, which is time consuming, expensive and relies on the GPS receiver to actually locate you - which it won't. I never saw the navigational aspect of the Nokia Maps application.

I once spent an hour on a train between Cambridge and London staring at the Nokia Maps application waiting for the GPS receiver to locate me and for my location to be displayed on screen. It didn't. Not once. My XDA could be a little slow in locating me and take up to 3 minutes. The Nokia had over an hour and still failed.

Conclusion
The N95 is an excellent phone provided you want it purely for it's features as a phone, camera and media playback device. If you're after a more "rich" experience with the Internet then it's a bad choice because so many other devices handle Internet connectivity much better. With things like the iPhone on the market, it has cast a divide down the mobile phone market; phones that are designed to be phones, and phones that are designed to handle the Internet. The N95 is the former, but it's probably the best one on the market.

Overall - an excellent phone with great firmware, a great operating system and easy interface. It just doesn't have good GPS and Internet and these are two things that will become increasingly crucial over the next year or two.

 

Enjoy this article? Why not subscribe to the full RSS feed?