Nokia N95 Review

The Nokia N95 is a feature packed device, with a large 2.6″ 240×320 pixel display, 5 megapixel camera, HSDPA, WiFi/WLAN, UMTS and GPS-based satellite navigation. There’s a FM radio too.

Internal memory is an impressive 160Mb, and this can be expanded with hot swappable microSD cards. Of course, it’s an MP3 player, but you’ll also need plenty of space to store pictures taken with the 5 megapixel camera and video clips.

This is wrapped up in an unusual two-way slider design. Move the screen up, and you’ll get the keypad in the usual slider phone fashion. Move the Nokia N95’s screen down and you’ll get multimedia control keys, designed to be used with the phone in landscape (wide) mode. The web browser can be used in landscape mode to, taking advantage of the N95’s 320 pixel wide display.

Talking of video clips, the N95 can record DVD quality video at 640×480 pixels @ 30fps. The camera is another one with Carl Zeiss optics, and it also has autofocus. However the Nokia N95 isn’t a direct rival to the Nokia N93 which has optical zoom and what appears to be a better lens.

The GPS on the Nokia N95 supports a “Maps” application which Nokia says “includes maps for more that 100 countries … covering more than 15 million points of interest”. Exactly what ships as standard with the Nokia N95 is not clear, but certainly some features will incur an extra cost.

There’s a trade-off in terms of battery life - the Nokia N95 manages 2 hours 40 minutes talktime on 3G, and just 3.5 hours on GSM. Music playback is up to 7 hours though, but no figures have been given for GPS operation.

This is a Symbian S60 device with the usual impressive wide array of applications that we’ve come to expect from high-end N series phones. This includes a range of programs to manipulate and share images and video clips, a comprehensive multimedia player, Visual Radio, an advanced web browser, email client, file viewer and a whole load of personal information management tools.

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