Last week I was having a wander around eBay and spotted a Nokia N95 8GB for £250 ‘buy it now’. It was new and in perfect condition, so it was a good purchase considering that it is normally £470 SIM free.
I have used one sporadically for review purposes over the past few months, but was impressed enough to want to really test one out to the full. It has been four days so far and I have discovered some unexpected advantages to the N95.
You get a TV out cable in the box, which works extremely well. My family watched the pre-loaded Spiderman 3 movie in perfect quality and this gives the potential for watching many other movies and TV episodes when away from home. Compare this to having to pay £29 for a TV Out cable for the iPod Touch, which in my case only produces a black and white picture on my TV. On the N95, the video playback is as good as the iPod Touch, albeit on a slightly smaller screen.
The music quality is on a par with the iPod Touch and with a decent set of headphones ‘may’ be slightly better. The interface for finding music is not as intuitive as the iPod (or iPhone) but is good enough to locate one track from a thousand in a couple of seconds.
The camera is very good indeed for a camera phone, and for my purposes has the potential to cope with the needs I have. I tend to take snaps of my children and photos for reviews and that is it, so my 7MP Samsung could be made redundant by the N95.
The mobile phone side is good with decent call quality, HSDPA and most importantly the ability to run for a LONG time when set to pure GPRS. Battery life is crucial and this phone knocks many Windows Mobile models out of the park in this area.
PIM and email management is a little tricky, mainly because of the older style data input, but I am forcing myself to use it and the more I do, the more I like it. At this point, it is forcing me to not over organise and this can be a good thing- the less I organise, the more I do.
GPS is not good on the N95. Nokia Maps is included, but even with the updated Nokia Maps 2.0 (which is in beta) it struggles to keep a signal and to work at a decent speed. Bizarrely, TomTom Navigator will work with the N95, but only with a separate GPS receiver. To be honest, I suspect the GPS receiver in the N95 to be much weaker than the TyTN II set up and so would probably prefer to have a separate receiver anyway.
As you know, I chop and change phones a lot but have never actually used a phone that can replace many of my other gadgets. With the N-Gage platform about to hit properly, the N95 can quite easily replace my PSP, Digital Camera, iPod Touch and smartphone. If you purchased one at full price, it can still be considered good value for money when you realise what it can do, and most importantly what it can do well.
Many converged devices are jack of all trades i.e. they do many things in an average way, but the N95 can do most things very well and become an acceptable replacement for other units.
