Nokia N95-4 - a solid triple but no Jesus phone.
Posted by The King on May 30th, 2008 filed in mobile, reviewAfter using a brand new Nokia N95-4 8gb (the “4″ signifies it is the US market HSDPA model) for about a week I’m left impressed but not in love, especially at around $700 I have some serious reservations.
What most impressed me was the photo + video quality and the automatic geotagging capabilities when shooting outdoors. Add in the fact that it can do OTA 3G uploads to most photo sharing services, blog sites, etc., *in real time as you shoot pictures + video* and you have one killer point and shoot camera (albeit an expensive one). Oh ya, 3G - did I mention that? It is smoking fast and thankfully the HSDPA coverage ATT has in Chicago is very good. As a tethered modem (even over Bluetooth) my laptop was browsing the net with freakish speed given the fact it was going through a cell phone.
Sounds great so far, right? Well, maybe its because we are spoiled by the iPhone’s Safari browser (note to Nokia why does your website not work w/ Safari 3.1?) but maybe the N95’s browsing abilities truly just suck. I tried the Symbian browser as well as mobile Opera but there are truly too many glitches (sloppy zooming/scrolling; poor text input abilities using numeric keypad; no auto-rotate of layout - you can slide the phone open to photo mode but it exudes the feeling of silly oversight). In practice I just wasn’t doing a whole lot of browsing or emailing. Why put up with these glitches when in half the time it would take to accomplish very little directly on the N95 I could have my 13″ Macbook up, tethered, and browsing the net?
Ok that’s the holistic review - the nitpicking complaints would include:
- PC suite is relatively slick, but don’t *force* me to use yet another program to add another step into my media management. When will manufacturers learn this? Also no Mac suite yet, only iSync.
- VOIP support is weak - I tried 3 Gizmo beta installs (why are there this many available? red flag #1) as well as directly entering all my SIP settings into the phone’s profile. . .I was able to make *one* successful phone call over VOIP and though my 3G reception was at full the call could definitely pass as a NASA recording between Houston and an orbiting Apollo space capsule circa 1965.
- Google Syncing: Couldn’t get it to work (despite their way above average support) with GooSync . . .since the time of testing though other services such as Spanning Sync can do a clean non-OTA sync (that is at least w/ Mac, for PC users I’m not sure what the best GCal & GContacts sync option would be).
- Slider opens far too easily when in pocket.
- Podcasting: I was *so* excited to have one of the first mainstream devices able to do OTA podcast aggregating. . .other than the download speed every other aspect of Podcast management was atrociously slow. The novelty of OTA downloads wore off after about 72hrs and I was soon fell back to using a generation one iPod nano.
- Enterprise Integration: untested on this go around.
- Quality and usability of the included wired headset was great - I’ve never so seamlessly switch between music and voice calls (by the 2nd time you use it you won’t even need to look at the buttons).
- Gorgeous and bright screen.
- Relatively fast UI - doing processor intensive tasks never made it hiccup. Granted its not shooting photos as fast as a dedicated camera, but impressive with the diverse firepower this thing packs.
- GPS was relatively fast to get satellite lock on cold boot (less than 30 seconds), free Google maps directions were great, the paid Nokia ones were even better.
- Battery life, at least on the N95-4 model I tested, was truly not that bad. I topped it off in the car with the cigarette lighter adapter (GPS being a big drain) from time to time and gave it a full nightly charge and never had problems.
