NOKIA N95 ~ Is this what computers became?

The much hyped & cherry on the cake to the NOKIA's N-Series cellphone is out now! Lets see where it stands!Presenting a review of this handset.
________________________________________________________________________________________ "Is this what computers have become?" they say in their promotion for the Nokia N95, which seems to have the muscle to power you with a PC in your pocket. The first of the N series phones to be released this year, N95 has had its share of popularity pre and post release.


Whats in the package?
The N95 has a very standard package. I'd like to point out at the earphones packaged, they are nothing what one would expect when paying the price one has to for a multi-feature screaming like this.

• Nokia N95 (handset)
• Stereo Headset with Playback controls (with 3.5mm jack on the volume control)
• 2GB microSD (with SD Card Adaptor)
• USB Cable
• Composite Cable
• Charger
• Manual & Software CD
  
  

Outlook & design->
The N95 has a unique design. It's essentially a slider, but what makes it unique is its ability to slide up to reveal playback controls, as well as slide down that gives you a neat widescreen display.

The phone is one of the lightest N series phones that I have come across. It weighs 120 grams, for its size that is quite okay. The dimensions are 99 x 53 x 21 mm. The phone weight is minimal because of its plastic build; add to that the neat distribution of weight throughout the phone. It's comfortable to hold in your hand and not slip off.


N95 has a 3G camera to the right of the earpiece, just above the screen. Next to the camera is a small LED for flash. The 16 million color-TFT screen of this phone is simply awesome with a size 40 x 53 mm and 240 x 320 pixels resolution support.

Below the screen is the menu key cluster: Two menu keys, a Main Menu key, 5-way D-pad, Shortcut key, two keys one each to answer and hang-up calls, Clipboard key and a Clear key form the cluster. The Clipboard key and the Clear keys are placed on a thin strip of metal and do pose accessibility problems. There were a lot of times when I meant to hit the clear key but ended up closing the application because the placement of the hang-up key being adjacent to it. The 5-way D-pad is easy to use and so are the other keys in the cluster.

Slide the phone upwards and the keypad is revealed. The keys here have a neat blue backlighting and are comfortable to use. The backlight starts to work automatically according to the light conditions you are working in.

As I mentioned earlier, sliding the screen down changes the orientation of the screen giving you a widescreen effect, followed by the shortcut menu to appear. You can edit or add more shortcuts to this menu from a predefined list. The playback controls are above the screen when the slider is pulled down or on the left of the screen when in its widescreen orientation. This unique sliding feature of the N95 can have its drawbacks. For example, it was quite irritating to keep sliding the phone up/down while surfing because while doing that you do need to do quite a bit of typing. Plus the plastic build of the phone creates a slight creaky noise when the slider is pushed up.

On the top left side of the phone is the left speaker of the phone and just below it is the 3.5mm stereo jack. You can either directly attach your headphones or the provided headset to it. The stereo jack also supports a composite cable via a 3.5mm pin. This way you can move the display to an external device and enjoy it on a bigger screen. In the center, on the left side of the phone is the IR port of the phone. Towards the end of the left side is the microSD card slot with a sturdy dust cover.

On the top right side of the phone is the other speaker. The speakers are loud and give a nice stereo sound effect. Just below it are the volume control keys of the phone that double as a zoom in/out buttons when in camera mode. Towards the bottom of the phone are two hotkeys: one, a hotkey to Gallery and the other is the Camera button. The camera button starts the camera application only if the camera lens shutter is open. The placement of the camera button falls in the area where one would ideally grip the phone. This way when you tend to hold the phone a bit firmly, the camera application keeps trying to open. If the keypad is locked, then it keeps displaying the message to unlock keypad.

The back of the phone has about 30% of the portion taken up by the camera. The lens has a neat manual shutter to protect it from dust. Also, there is a large single LED for flash. The rest of the 70% of the phone's rear is plain, covering the battery compartment.

On top center of the phone lies the power button which also doubles as the profile selector. At the bottom left of the phone is the charging port. In the center there is a miniUSB port for transfer and PC sync. The mouthpiece of the phone is placed to its right.

Interface & multimedia->
The N95 is a smartphone and goes without saying that it is a Series 60UI. The interface is built on Symbian v9.2, the latest of the series. Symbian phones have always been slow and inspite of the 200 MHz processor, they haven't become any faster. Therefore, as one would expect, the N95 too is quite slow and keeps you waiting while opening or working in applications. The phone is generously fast through the menus atleast. The phone has 120 MB of internal memory that is way more than any phone I know; add to that, the bundled 2 GB card which makes for sufficient amounts of space to hold your data.

The pre-installed applications on the phone are as follows: Quick Office, Adobe PDF, Zip, and Barcode. The Barcode software helps by scanning barcodes and reveals details stored in the code. There is also a GPS application installed that entails maps of about 100 countries. Pre-installed games consist of Snakes and SRE.

The N95 has been portrayed as a PC, which is an alternate way of saying that it is convergence of both business and entertainment. But it still stays that N-Series is the 'N-tertainment' range of phones from Nokia. The multimedia capabilities of the N95 are no doubt, quite a bundle. The phone has a standalone music player that immediately starts with the press of any playback controls which are revealed when you slide the screen down. The large screen with its high resolution makes for pleasurable viewing of videos.
The other part of entertainment offered by the phone is its camera which we will look at in detail.


Camera->
The N95 has a 5 MP camera, which is the highest resolution available in a phone. It also has auto focus and flash to help you attain the best image quality. The camera has a focal length of 5.6 mm and digital zoom of 20x. Here the digital zoom is limited to 10x. The lens used is Carl Zeiss, which should generally be considered as a quality assurance stamp. But some how, that isn't the case with the combination in N95; the phone does a lot of image processing after the image is captured. This not only takes a lot of time before the image is sampled but also puts in some amounts of blur in the image when viewed at full resolution on the computer. There is a feel of oil paint used in the final image. The images when viewed on the phone look brilliant, but at the actual size of 2592 x 1944 pixels you cannot help but notice that they're not that great. At the end of the article I've placed images and the links to the images full resolution.

The camera auto focus is much like those seen in any other phones with the same. The irritating part was the sound that it made while focusing. It felt like the lens snapped very time it focused, I guess it's a build issue. There are a lot of modes to capture images in: Auto, Portrait, Landscape, Macro, Sports, Night, Night portrait and User Defined. The User Defined mode is a complete custom defined mode where you can customize the mode as per the scene, flash, white balance, exposure compensation, color tone, light sensitivity value, contrast and sharpness. All these customizations are also available when clicking an image in the default scene modes. There are three types of flash: Auto, Red Eye and on/off. There is also a Sequence mode, wherein you specify the time gap between pictures and the phone will do the capturing automatically. You can set it anywhere between a 10 seconds to 15 minutes gaps. There is also the Burst mode that comes under the sequence mode, this allows you to keep capturing photographs until you release the camera button. There is a gap of about 3-4 seconds between each click. The video capture of the N95 is VGA (640 x 480). It captures video in .MP4 format. Here the digital zoom is limited to 10x. The video capture rate is 30 fps. A one minute video would take around 20-25 MB of space. The scene modes are available in video as well. The only drawback in video is that the flash doesn't remain on as in the Sony Ericssons; therefore, videos captured in the night are pretty bad. There is a red LED in the flash area which keeps focusing while shooting, because of which there is always some red tinge seen in the video captured at night.


Audio Video ->
The audio quality of the N95 is average. The sound can't be compared to the likes of the Walkman series. Place it against its own in the N-Series and it's the best sounding. As I mentioned in the bundle, the earphones bundled along weren't the ones I'd expect to see. They were small and came off as soon as there was some breeze blowing. The good part is that both the phone and the headset's playback control unit have 3.5mm jacks. That makes it possible to connect your own headphones to either the phone directly or the headset. The moment you connect the headset or your headphone, the phone provides you with a list of options to choose from; Headphone, Headset, TV-Out Cable and Music Stand. All of these connect through the same port and that is the reason why you have to specify, else it won't start channeling the audio to the port. In the headphone mode you will have to use the phone to answer calls, while with the headset you can answer them through the inbuilt microphone of the headset.

I faced problems with the headset of the phone, it was as if the headset's playback control unit was faulty. It wouldn't change tracks, increase/decrease volume etc., basically not working.

The phone uses Real Media Player to play video files. It supports all the standard phone video formats. Videos watched in the widescreen mode were real fun.

Connectivity ->
The N95 has most connectivity options that phones these days can offer. It obviously has GPRS Class 10, which is a very basic feature these days. The list continues with HSCSD, Class 32 EDGE, 3G, WiFi 802.11 b/g, Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP to enjoy stereo quality music wirelessly, the ancient Infra-red port is included as well along with a USB v2.0 for faster file transfers. On attaching the USB cable, the phone gives a list of options like the list of options seen when attaching the headset. Here the list reads: PC Suite, Mass Storage, Image Print, and Media Player. The USB transfer speeds aren't the fastest, but are quite acceptable. The given adaptor for the microSD card is much better to transfer data to the card via a memory card reader.


I mentioned earlier, the screen of the N95 makes for a widescreen display. Surfing on this widescreen was absolute fun via WiFi. It was quite troublesome setting the phone for WiFi and I decided that I'd provide you guys with a guide; so you'll have to wait for that special, in case you do end up buying this phone.





Battery ->

The N95 has a 950 mAh battery. In simpler phones this rating of battery provides really good battery life, but for a powerhouse like the N95, this ain't sufficient. Under standard conditions the box states 220 hours of standby and 6 hours 30 minutes of talktime. In reality, it did nothing close to that. The phone managed to last 10 hours and at times crawled uptoto 12 hours. The usage in these hours included about 3 hours of music playback (through headset), 1 hour 30 minutes of talktime and less than 30 minutes of WiFi. All this got the battery drained out in just half a day.


So ultimately ->

Pros-> Carl Zeiss 5 MP lens, Autofocus with flash, 2GB microSD, A2DP
Bluetooth v2.0, WiFi, Light Weight, 3G.
Cons-> Plastic Body, Slow, Lots of Image Processing, Poor Battery Life,
Slightly Cramped Outer Keys.