12
- The Good: Impressive sound quality. 3.5 mm jack for normal headphones and TV out. Good quality camera. USB connectivity with drag-and-drop file transfer. 8GB onboard memory. Nokia Maps. Dynamic and fast-loading Web browser.
- The Bad: Somewhat cumbersome sliding mechanism for changing screen alignment. No QWERTY keypad. Secondary camera very poor quality. Battery life not great.
- The Verdict: Impressive multimedia device hampered by lack of QWERTY keypad.
The first phone from Nokia's N series to hit Canada, courtesy of Rogers Wireless, is the N95. It's billed as a “multimedia computer,” but this lofty and inaccurate moniker doesn't do the phone much justice. It's still far more phone than computer, but the N95 does, at least, live up to the “multimedia” part of the label in convincing fashion.
MULTIMEDIA BUFFET
Between the Rogers Vision suite and Nokia's own set of pre-loaded applications and widgets, the N95 manages to provide virtually every conceivable way of ingesting, transferring, recording or sending media. The sheer amount of media the N95 puts at the fingertips is impressive: GPS, two-way video calling, a dynamic and fast-loading Web browser with WLAN support, streaming video, TV and radio, access to 1.8 million tracks from the Rogers Music Store, support for up to 10 e-mail accounts, and various social networking outlets including Facebook Mobile, MySpace Mobile, Windows Live Spaces, Flickr and the newest mobile fad: Lifeblogging, where you can upload images and text to a Typepad blog on the fly.
Nokia's N95 is an impressive multimedia device hampered only slightly by lack of QWERTY keypad
Related Articles
TWEAKING IN THE RIGHT PLACES
The N95 undeniably does a lot of things right. For example, finicky and ill-placed card slots are a thing of the past. Instead, the N95 has 8 gigabytes of onboard memory, which puts its storage capacity on par with the average stand-alone flash-based digital audio player. When connected to a PC, the phone behaves like any other USB storage device, and transferring media between the two is a simple matter of dragging-and-dropping.
The phone's exterior boasts both a left and right speaker for stereo separation – and they're powerful enough to fill a large room on full blast without distortion. The most exciting external feature had to be the 3.5 mm output jack, which can accommodate normal audio player headphones (no more proprietary cellphone headphones – yeah!) but also RCA cables for watching any of the phone's multimedia functions, whether it be photos, videos or streaming TV – on your home television set.
SLIDING AND SNAPPING
I'm less enthusiastic about the N95's somewhat gimmicky two-way slider design. Slide the screen up to reveal the numeric keypad underneath like a typical slider phone, but push the screen in the other direction and you'll be able to access a small panel with four vertically-aligned playback controls (FF, Play/Pause, Stop, Rewind) with the screen alignment going from letterboxed to horizontal.
To have the screen flip only when slid in a certain direction is a less elegant solution than simply responding to the tilt of the phone like some other devices do. Also, some applications only work in portrait mode, and when the phone is horizontally aligned the volume control confusingly inverts.
The N95's main camera features a 5-megapixel lens with Carl Zeiss optics and sophisticated image settings, including scene selection, self-timer, flash modes and a focus lock. The phone's dedicated camera quick-launch and quick-review buttons make it feel even more like a true digital point-and-shoot, and most importantly, the camera takes decent pictures even when blown up on a large TV screen.
HOW LOW IS TOO LOW(-RES)?
The same can't be said of the secondary camera. I suppose the fact that the phone even has a “secondary camera” is impressive; the idea is that instead of struggling to centre your self-portraits in a tiny viewing window or mirror, there's actually a second smaller lens and flash on the other side of the phone so you can use the main screen as viewfinder for both. Unfortunately, the image quality of the secondary camera is so low-res and pixellated that it's not even worth the effort for off the cuff shots.
Other complaints are with applications, and not necessarily the phone's fault. Rogers' MobiTV is still patchy and inconsistent, N-Gage games are still nowhere near the calibre of standalone portable gaming consoles like the Nintendo DS or Sony PSP, and there's still the long-standing issue that to get all of these neat applications you're going to have to pay monthly subscription fees – on top of the phone itself costing $399.99 with a three-year activation on the Rogers Vision Unlimited On-Device Mobile Browsing Plan.
After about three hours of combined video-watching, music-listening, some GPS, web browsing and generally fiddling around with the N95, its battery had gone down by about three out of seven bars. Meaning, battery life is decent but not great.
WHEN IS A COMPUTER NOT A COMPUTER? WHEN IT'S A PHONE…
Many cellphones have been billed as multimedia powerhouses but end up falling short for various reasons. While the N95 isn't perfect, it certainly offers several leaps in the right direction, especially with advancements made in audio, video and GPS capabilities. But while its multimedia capabilities are impressive, I was surprised that a device trying to call itself a “multimedia computer” didn't even have a QWERTY keyboard (or a touch-screen, for that matter). If there's one glaring omission in the N95's impressive roster of features, it's that no matter how sophisticated the application you're still reduced to plunking away on a cumbersome numeric keypad.
