Nokia NSeries : Nokia N95

Here's one variation of my dream Nokia NSeries device: combine the Nokia N73's excellent camera with autofocus lens and its larger display with the Nokia N80's WiFi, d-pad and compact slider design. Nokia did more than one better with their latest NSeries phone, the N95: it features a 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss autofocus lens, a 2.6" QVGA display and a two way slider. Oh yes, and there's an internal full GPS with free maps covering 100 countries. But let's not forget the Bluetooth 2.0 +EDR, full-featured music player, standard 3.5mm stereo headphone jack, VGA video camera, the excellent S60 Feature Pack 1 web browser based on Safari technology, Euro-only 3G, quad band GSM + EDGE, the usual super-strong Nokia reception and MS Office viewer applications.

The N95 is a mid-sized phone that's similar in size to the Nokia N80 but slimmer. It features a two-way slider design: slide the display up to reveal the number pad and slide it down to switch to landscape mode, access playback controls and see a palette of multimedia applications: video player, gallery, maps, the web browser, music player, FM radio, LifeBlog, and a 3D game called System Rush: Evolution.


The N95 is a fast little bugger by S60 standards, being more responsive when opening menus and applications than the N80 and N73. It's faster than Windows Mobile 5 and 6 when navigating the device and launching applications but not as fast as the quicker feature phones or Palm OS. The Nokia runs on an Texas Instruments ARM 11 dual core processor clocked at 332 MHz. It features a dedicated 3D hardware graphics processor and from the included demo version of the 3D game System Rush: Evolution, we'd say 3D gaming performance is excellent.

For storage the phone has nearly 160 megs available and you can expand that with a microSD card up to 2 gigs in capacity. At boot there's 20 megs of free RAM to run programs, and unlike the N80 and N73, running Gallery and the web browser simultaneously didn't cause problems. The only time we got a not enough memory error was when we left System Rush running in the background and then tried to launch Snakes. 20 megs is OK, but we'd still like to see more RAM, Nokia.


Like the N80 and N93, the Nokia N95 has WiFi 802.11b/g. You can use the WLAN wizard to setup your connection, and have the phone ask you whether to use WiFi or the cellular data connection when connecting to the Net. You can also set the default to be WiFi if you wish, and you can use WiFi to download map data in the Maps application (certainly faster than EDGE!). Application and video downloads are downright fast using WiFi, and though we find ourselves using WiFi surprisingly little (thanks to unlimited US data accounts and US 3G services/phones) on most devices, the Nokia makes it so easy to select and use the 802.11 connection when starting up a data session that we used it more. The N95 also supports UPnP for those who like to stream media over their home wireless network. As expected, battery life takes a hit when using WiFi: it's not bad if you use it only to download a few apps or surf for 20 minutes, but if you surf or stream media for 2 hours, you'll use over 2/3 of the battery.

The Nokia comes with a good set of accessories including a 1 gig microSD card, mini USB to USB sync cable (gone are the specialized Nokia USB cables and Pop-Port, finally), world travel charger (the same charger used with most Nokia phones made from 2005 onward), Lithium Ion rechargeable battery BP-5F, a remote with detachable 3.5mm earbud stereo headphones (the remote controls music playback and has a mic for calls), 3.5mm to AV cables (RCA connectors for video, left and right audio), a software CD with PC Suite and LifeBlog and a manual.