Review Friday: Nokia N95
Okay, every Friday I will review something. It maybe my phone, a shop, a place or something I’ve had for a long time. Who knows.
Anyway on with the first review. The Nokia N95.
(This image was originally posted to Flickr [Flickr] by jurvetson . Sourced from Wikipedia’s article on the N95 [Wikipedia] and released under the Creative Commons 2.0 Attribution License.)
I purchased one of these ’smartphones’ (or mobile computers as Nokia likes to call them) at the end of August, on the Three network, simply because of the unlimited data package they offer (their X-series [Three.com] packages). As this phone has a very capable web browser and mail client it would be silly not to use them, or very costly at the end of the month if you had to pay for data.
A quick rundown of the N95’s distinguishing features:
- 5 Megapixel Camera (no optical zoom, halfway decent lens though).
- 2.6″ 240 x 320 display (large for a phone, helps with web browsing and video playback).
- HSDPA support (when Three get it rolled out, this means faster speeds across the south).
- GPS receiver (very limited, difficult to get a signal).
- SDHC slot (for new SDHC cards that come in announced capacities up to 16Gbyte)
I will try not to focus on the Three network in this review and describe what I like and dislike about this phone as well as what I found difficult about it. Nokia’s strap line for the N95 “It’s what computers have become.” is pretty bold (but then so is their current challenge to Apple, the Open campaign [Macrumors.com].) and makes it clear that this phone is for people who want to be able to browse the web, check their e-mail, listen to music, watch videos all on one device. So it’s trying to do the job of at least two specialised devices.
It looks like quite a large phone, yet is actually only about the same size as a Nokia N70. It’s a nice size though, that definitely shows the trend that people want more features in larger phones again.
When I first turned the phone on I was presented with a ‘First run wizard’, which I hoped was going to allow me to set-up much of the phone. However it’s sole purpose was to set up my e-mail account. The N95’s messaging center, which deals with SMS, MMS, POP3 e-mail and IMAP, is a very good idea, rather than having a separate e-mail client (although Three supply an application called MobileMail which does the same thing. This is probably useful on phones which do not have mail clients built-in).
Setting up e-mail has always been a slightly technical affair, and this proved no different. It asked me for my outgoing server, incoming server, username, password, protocol, ports. All the usual suspects, which would likely confuse a less technical user, although they probably aren’t the target audience for this phone. It’s geared toward technophiles, so this shouldn’t be a problem. And within a few minutes I had set up an IMAP account to check my mail at the university! I don’t think I can send e-mail using my KU e-mail, as they appear to block the port (or are using a non-standard one) but this isn’t a big deal.
I then attempted to set up a POP3 account using G-mail. This was slightly trickier as I couldn’t get it to connect. At first it’s because I had to enable POP on my Gmail account [Google.com]. After that I still couldn’t connect. However a quick search using Google found a forum with other users having the same problem [n95users.com]. I followed the instructions in the third post and it worked.
Next up was to play around with the internet. Now even though I have unlimited internet on my phone it seems silly to use the slower 3G link when I have nice fast broadband in my home. No problem, I’ll use the built in Wireless LAN feature to connect to my router.
My phone easily saw the router and a I duly put in the WEP key to access the network. No luck though, it kept giving me the error “Web: No gateway reply”. I tried again (having to input my 26 character WEP key again) still no luck. I messed around with a few settings on my router and got it to connect briefly. But everytime I tried I had to input my WEP key again. I realized it was a network problem (my ramshackle wireless set-up), and that I had DHCP turned off on my router, which the N95 was expecting.
Another quick Google search, and I found that I had to set up my WLAN router [europe.nokia.com] as an Access Point in the phone.
Now I also took this opportunity to properly set up my router (yeah, I don’t have a lot to do on Friday nights, which is one of the reasons I’m doing this (ahaha)) with DHCP static addresses and stuff.
So, now I have a phone which will connect to my Wireless network and pick up my e-mail. Great.
Now let’s do something odd, and use it as *gasp* a phone. To do that I need my contacts which are stored on my Mac in the address book. I ran through the steps of pairing up the N95 with my Mac as I had done with my old phone, only to be told I needed a plug-in.
After a quick visit to the Nokia website I found a page on iSync [europe.nokia.com] (Apple’s answer to Activsync). Installed the plug-in, and clicked sync. Within seconds my contacts, my university timetables (from iCal) and my to-do notes were transfered to the phone. Great. I quickly called someone and had a quick chat, and then sent out a mass text to people advertising my new number.
The next thing to tackle was the multimedia side of the phone. This phone, sorry “mobile computer”, is capable of playing back several popular formats including MP3s. I mounted the memory card and threw some MP3s on to the card and inserted it into the phone. I ran the music application and none of them were listed. I had a quick look at the menu and saw the option to rescan music library. The phone appears to maintain a database of multimedia files which needs to be updated everytime something new was added to the memory. This was (and still is) kind of tedious, especially if you update the memory several times a week. There was also no playlist support or iTunes integration, which I felt would make browsing my music quite difficult especially if there are a few hundred tracks on there. Another quick Google (what a wonderful tool that is, I might have to write something about it someday) pointed me to Nokia’s Multimedia Transfer [europe.nokia.com] application for Mac. It’s still beta software, but I have found it to be quite stable. It provides iLife integration for the N95, automatically downloading image to your iPhoto library (where I can export them to my gallery) and transferring music from an N95 folder in iTunes. You still need to rescan the music library, but at least it’s organized now.
About that time the battery died, and I had to charge it up again.
Those were my initial impressions of the device, and every day I discover something new about it. It’s become something of a necessity now, carrying my pictures, my music, my contacts.. basically my life around on a device no bigger than a computer mouse.
I’ve used the N95 every day since, taking photos (even of the moon), playing with the GPS feature, which could be useful if you were lost (provided it was a clear day and nothing obscures your view of the sky), using it as an MP3 player, watching youtube on the bus. I leave home with it at 8AM and everyday it dies before 6pm. So on a full charge you get just less than 10 hours of use. Not a problem until one day I forget to charge it up at night, or I’m out later than 6pm.
Good things
- Good camera
- Mobile internet
- Consolidates several devices into one
Bad things
- Poor battery life
- Useless GPS
- Tiny buttons
In summary, I think the N95 is a great phone, hampered by it’s battery life. It’s a competitive camera, a portable web browser, a mobile mail client, an MP3 player with a wealth of applications (as it runs Symbian 6 Series V3) such as SSH clients [Symbian-freeware.com] and document scanners [Scanr.com].
So that’s it for this week, I think I just about made it within the Friday deadline.
Have a good weekend :P
Edit: I realized I had been typing in the Visual post mode on wordpress after i click publish. So of course all of my HTML tags (the < and > ) were transformed into < and > (or something similar). Anyway, that’s fixed now.