Nokia N96 lightning review
photo credit: James Nash (aka Cirrus)
I got a new N96 a couple of weeks ago, as my old Nokia was barely functional any more. No backlight and ~8 hours battery life is not good, I tell you now.
The good:
- Build quality is nice. Some people might say it's a bit big, but I like it. Despite its size, it's still quite light – I weighed it against an iPhone and it came out lighter.
- Huge, excellent quailty screen.
- 16GB of storage, for plenty of music. Goodbye iPod.
- FM Radio(!)
- Uploading geotagged pictures to Flickr works a treat. You do have to remember to have Location Tagger running though.
- BBC iPlayer, not that I've used this much yet (see below).
- Tonnes of apps thanks to Symbian. Decent ones include:
- PuTTY for Symbian OS
- Opera Mini
- Google Maps for your phone
- ??? (I'm sure there are more good ones that I don't know of yet, please let me know)
The bad:
- The firmware that it came with is, quite frankly, shocking. Crashes and bugs galore. The worst part of it seems to be the accelerometer – the screen redrawing when it detects a rotation is awful. Seeing half drawn applications in each orientation is not what you want to see on your expensive new phone. There's also some general slowness with apps taking a while to initialise, but I suspect this is inherent.
- The camera, despite being touted as excellent, seems to produce pretty grainy pictures to me. I hope it's just the way I'm using it, because I'm getting the feeling that "Carl Zeiss optics" aren't as good as Nokia try and make you think they are.
- iPlayer works great on wifi, but the videos never start over 3G.
- If you actually do stuff with it, the battery life can be quite terrible – just doing a bit of 3G internet use (SSH or WWW) is enough to drain the battery to nothing in a few hours.
- Closing applications on a phone is odd, and I keep forgetting to do it. Some applications close when you hit the red button, and some don't. I need to get used to this. Annoying the "Log" application doesn't close after you use it to make a call.
- Shutting the slider while on a call doesn't end it.
- I've had it freeze up while a call is coming in and refuse to answer it, causing me to miss the call. It was from a withheld number too, so I couldn't call back (not that I should have to).
There was a letter in the box apologising for the quality of the intial firmware so I'm quite hopeful that a lot of these issues will be fixed when an update is release. I don't know how good Nokia's track record is on this, but we'll see. All in all, I'm fairly happy with it, and when the bugs get ironed out it'll be awesome.
October 26th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
Oh, I though they had made improvements over the N95, which I own one. Also, you need a windows in order to do the firmware update. Sucks.
October 26th, 2008 at 9:28 pm
I've got an N95 8Gb and was annoyed about the photo quality… until I realised I was doing something silly. Hopefully the N96's system is the same so this might help… unless you're doing this and think its still rubbish quality.
The shutter button has two levels. Press it lightly, and the viewfinder lines will go flash, you'll hear whirring and it will focus. Eventually the flashing will stop, they'll go green and the phone will beep. Then press the button down the entire way to take the final photo. http://www.flickr.com/photos/29781724@N07/2951747757/sizes/l/ is a scaled down version of one of my photos on flickr. I'm really not a photo nut, but that seems really nice quality to me.
The n95 8Gb to me seems like tons of features, all meshed together by different people with nobody looking at the bigger picture. It does have crashing problems, and sometimes the gps doesn't seem to enable/disable properly requiring a restart but i love the phone. I'm glad they've continued the tradition
I'm just annoyed they haven't released iplayer for the N95, haven't looked at the technical differences between that and the N96 so probably something I'm missing,
October 26th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
Oh forgot to mention, every single one of the issues you describe above is something I experience on my phone so don't hold your breath for fixes.
October 26th, 2008 at 10:44 pm
I have an n95 because the company I work for develop an app for location aware phones, so I get a free one. However, I have to say, I HATE how light it is – both it and the n96 seem to be poorly built in my opinion – they both feel like they are about to fall apart. The e series phones seem to be much better in this, they feel more solid, and seem to be much higher quality, go hold the e71 or e90 for instance.
Anyway, hope you enjoy it.
October 26th, 2008 at 11:01 pm
Oh come now, go easy on the camera, it's a damn sight better offering in the N95 and N96 than just about any other mobile phone camera. The problem with grainy images is the same with cheap point and shoots. Often enough it isn't the lens itself (that generally produces other distortions), but the fact they're using image sensors smaller than your little finger nail, and trying to punch out 5mp resolutions. That just equals noise and grain. Every time.
Sunlight and flash is where the n95/n96 want to be at, get it into low light and it ramps up the ISO even more, which just brutalizes the end result with even more noise and grain.
I've taken a few respectable photos with the n95 myself, but it is a phone camera, it has it's limits, you've gotta play to them.
January 15th, 2010 at 11:23 pm
I've got a really slick, slim, Nokia that is a 'phone, plays music, has FM radio, even a cr*ppy little camera with a lens and sensor the size of pins – the sort that fit into mobile phones – fine for snappy happies but as good as a chocolate teapot for real photographers. (It doesn't matter who makes a lensa if it shines on to a sensor that's too small). Oh yes, and it has Sudoku.
It cost me £5 (after free £15 top-ups and cancelled (pointless)) 'bundled' insurance are taken into account), brand new, from a 'phone shop, a year ago. I anticipate a good ten years of use out of it. It is much *much* slimmer and less cumbersome than the i-This, or Nok-that rip-off fashion statements that pretend to be computers. Well, are computers, just of close to zero use for proper computing with their 'screens' and 'keyboards' designed for budgerigars, not humans.
The only thing a mobile 'phone is actually good for is making 'phone calls. It is passable for music and sudoku. Anything else is misplaced fluff, that would be better out of sight in a belly button. Of course, if the 'phone (and 'apps') companies can persuade mugs to pay several hundred pounds for £5 worth of functionality and a bunch of fluff, good luck to them.
'One born every minute'? Thousands, more likely. Still, you give us wiser folks something to laugh about, when the MPs are off the air.