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.