| Review of the Nokia N95 8GB |
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The Nokia N95 8GB is the most recent iteration of the much-hyped Nokia
Smartphone. This model is now being carried officially in Canada by Rogers
and they’ve recently dropped the price to $199 for a 3-year contract to
match the Apple iPhone 3G. Nokia bills the N95 as “Canada’s Smartest
Smartphone”. I don’t know about that, but it’s still a pretty good phone
as you’ll see. The Nokia N95 8GB is available through Rogers. Last Updated: 01-Aug-2008 |
Before reading this review, please read Some Thoughts on Phone Reviewing.
Note that the N95-4 differs from its predecessors in that
it has 8 GB of internal flash memory instead of a MicroSD slot. This also means
that you can’t upgrade the memory, but 8 GB is a pretty decent amount of storage
for all but the most ardent multimedia fans out there, not to mention that it
comes included in the $199 price tag.
This review will be more in-depth than usual, since I was able to secure an N95
for a 2-week trial. I also happen to like the phone personally, and so I spent
more than the usual amount of time playing with it. In the end I bought one for
myself, and so my experience with the N95 exceeds the usual for phones I review.
RF Performance
Click on this link for a full description of
RF Performance, and how to interpret it.
RF Sensitivity: I tested this aspect of the phone
on the same day as I tested the iPhone 3G.
Tests were performed, as usual, over at Square One shopping center in
Mississauga. However, in the case of the N95 (and the iPhone) it has become
increasingly difficult to perform these tests there for lack of any
easily-accessible locations that really weaken the Rogers UMTS signal. I had to
resort to taking the phone into one of the washrooms off of the old Hall of
Shame (near the mall’s center court). Compared to other 3G phones I’ve
tested there, the N95 and the iPhone were the best I’d ever tested.
The performance of the 3G & 2G networks at Square One leads one to believe that 3G would always be superior. However, I also tested the performance of the N95 over at the IKEA store in Etobicoke (though against a Nokia E51 rather than the iPhone). The lower level of that store blocks out signals from all of the providers and it has proven to be an interesting place to test the RF capabilities. Oddly however, 3G coverage is markedly poorer at that store, but it gave me the opportunity to test the 2G performance. The N95 matched the sensitivity of E51, which has already proven to have excellent 2G performance.
The IKEA location also proved that the Rogers network
will automatically handoff a call from 3G to 2G if it becomes necessary, but a
handoff back to 3G does not occur.
Over-the-road Performance: I still haven’t tested
enough UMTS phones to be certain of what’s normal and what’s not normal, but the
N95 suffers from little (if any) audio disturbances while driving around the
Toronto area. As I noted in the article What is
UMTS, the CODEC used by GSM on their WCDMA network seems to be much more
robust than the EVRC CODEC used in CDMA networks. Using the N95 on the move
with the Rogers 3G network is not detectably different from using it in a
stationary location. Perhaps this will prove to be common in many UMTS phones, but
for now I just don't have enough examples to know for sure.
Side Note: If I do determine that this aspect of UMTS
is as good as what I've seen (in the limited number of such phones I've tested)
I will very likely remove this sub-heading in future UMTS reviews. There isn't
much point reviewing a facet of performance that seems to have been literally
taken out of the equation by the excellence of the AMR CODEC mated to a WCDMA
air interface.
Audio Performance
Click on this link for a full description of
Audio Performance, and how to interpret it.
Tonal Balance: Unlike quite a few of the
tinny-sounding Nokia Smartphones I’d tested in the last year or so, the N95 has
fairly decent tonal balance. It could do with a little more low-end to
give it a truly rich sound, but overall the quality of the sound can best be
described as well-balanced, but a tad thin. Note that the Apple iPhone 3G does
provide slightly better tonal balance than the N95.
I talked with many different people on the N95 during my tests and most of them
sounded great. There was no apparent peakiness or boominess to the sound and it
remained pleasant to listen to for prolonged periods of them. Just the same, I
can't quite give the N95 an A+ on this issue. It comes in around a B+ to an A-.
Sound Reproduction: There were absolutely no
problems here. The N95 introduced virtually no distortion to the sound, and even
when I listened to recordings that were notorious for sounding a bit coarse on
other phones, they sounded relatively smooth on the N95. There is a small amount
of hiss in the background, but it’s not too severe and I didn't find that it
bothered much. To be fair however, I was used to the i880, which had
considerably more earpiece hiss (so it's all relative).
Earpiece Volume: Like virtually all Nokia models on
the market for the last 10 years, the N95 has a volume-boost feature that raises
the loudness of the audio (across all volume settings) as the background noise
increases. When used in a quiet room you get more than enough volume for the
conditions, but you're left wondering how you’d ever be able to hear the thing
in a noisy location. The amount of volume boost on the N95 is actually quite
astonishing and it kicks in cleanly so that there is no sudden change in the
level. In noisy environments, such as a crowded mall or out on the street, the
earpiece volume is very loud (and at least the equal of my old Motorola i880).
Outgoing Audio: Under quiet conditions the overall
sound quality and tonal balance of the outgoing audio is very good, but the
phone doesn’t deal particularly well with certain types of background noise. It
seems to pickup quite a bit of the background din at a crowded mall, but it does
a fairly decent job on traffic noise. It’s nowhere near as good as the i880 at
suppressing noise, but it's still miles better than some phones I’ve tested
recently, including the really poor showing I got from the
Nokia 5200.
Speakerphone: I’ve often noted in my reviews that
there are good Nokia speakerphone implementations and there are bad Nokia
speakerphone implementations. I’m happy to report that this is one of the really
good ones. While it might not generate quite as much raw volume as a typical
iDEN phone, the audio it does generate is nothing short of excellent. Making
speakerphone calls with the N95 is comfortable and natural and you'll probably
be tempted to do it whenever your situation allows.
All speakerphones must resort to blanking out audio in one direction or another
to avoid feedback. The N95 does that at the caller's end, where your voice is
blanked if there background noise gets really loud. It might therefore be
impossible to use speakerphone when talking to someone who is driving on the
highway with their windows open. Under less severe conditions however, the
speakerphone sounds like it magically supports full duplex without any echo or
mysterious cutouts.
As for volume, you couldn’t really use the feature in a crowded mall for
example, but I was able to use it to carry on a fairly decent conversation
outdoors with some distant traffic noise present. My caller reported very
little extra background noise when in speakerphone mode over that of the
standard mode (despite increased microphone sensitivity to voices
from further away).
I also tried a test of the speakerphone feature in a
car going at highway speeds. Even with the window rolled down, which made it
very noisy in there, the microphone still managed to pick up my voice clearly
(from an arm's-length away) and do a very credible job of keeping the background
noise under control. It was by then a bit noisy to really hear the person at the
other end, but it demonstrated how good the outgoing audio sounded under any
conditions in which you'd likely want to use the speakerphone feature.
Support Features
Ringer Volume: I installed my
Loud Ringer MP3 file onto the N95 and I
compared it directly against the same MP3 file on my i880. The N95 wasn’t quite
as loud as the iDEN phone, but it came closer than any other phone I’ve ever
tested. Even the standard ringtones (including the ubiquitous Nokia Ring)
were louder than anything I’d heard outside of a Motorola iDEN model.
Some people have complained that the N95 limits uploaded ringtones to 600K in
size, but let's be reasonable here. 600K represents almost 40 seconds of MP3 at
128 kilobits. You only get about 15 seconds of ringing before you call goes
through to voicemail anyway. The limit therefore doesn't strike me as a problem
at all.
Keypad Design: This is one area where the phone is
a bit disappointing. The keys worked well enough, but they are crowded and
fiddly to the point that it is sometimes difficult to ensure that I hit the
correct key. Fortunately the keys had relatively good tactile feel, and so it
was rare that a key went un-pressed.
The 4-way cursor pad is certainly not one of the worst implementations on a
Nokia model, but it’s certainly not the best. The OK button was sometimes
difficult to press without accidentally actuating one of the cursor keys. The
numeric keys have raised humps that make them easy to tell apart vertically
(though not horizontally), but the hump might actually be why it’s sometimes
easy to stray onto the wrong key while attempting to enter information quickly.
To its credit however, the top row of keys on the slide-out numeric keypad are
sufficiently distant from the slider that there is no issue with reaching them.
I’ve tested many a slider where getting at the top row of keys was made
difficult by the close proximity of the slide.
A unique feature of the N95 is a second small keyboard that is exposed if you
move the slider down rather than up. These 4 keys contain the standard media
control functions (pause/play, stop, fast forward, and rewind). When the screen
is slid open in this direction its orientation changes from portrait to
landscape. Curiously the N95 contains an accelerometer just like the iPhone, but
Nokia chose not to support it in the operating system to change screen
orientation automatically. There is however a 3rd-party applet you can
add to the phone to provide this functionality.
Display: While certainly not in the same league as
the iPhone (which has an enormous 3.5-inch screen with a resolution of 480 x
320) the N95 is still no slouch. It has a fairly large 2.8-inch screen boasting
a resolution of 320 x 240 with a full 16 million colors. The screen is fairly
bright, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the brightness of the iPhone screen. The
N95 is quite visible in direct sunlight, but the colors are washed out under those
conditions. I’d have to give the screen a grade of B to B+.
Icing on the Cake
Camera: The camera on the N95 is so good that it
deserves a lot of page real-estate to cover it all. I have therefore put the
review of the N95 camera on its own page.
Click here to read the camera review and view numerous sample photographs.
GPS: The N95 includes a built-in GPS receiver that
is fully accessible to 3rd party applications. In fact, Google has written a
Symbian-specific version of their excellent Google Maps application. This
version includes their My Location feature that can use just the signals
from the cell sites to roughly find your location, but you can also turn on
access to the GPS receiver to find your location to within as little as 20 meters ,
depending upon the quality of the satellite signal.
After reading the manual and discovering the correct way to hold the phone, I
was really surprised at just how sensitive the GPS receiver is. Even from inside
my house (well away from the windows on the lower level) I was able to acquire 5
satellites and yield a true position in about 15 to 20 seconds. The receiver’s sensitivity is impaired
somewhat when the slider is closed, but once the satellites are locked I had no
trouble outdoors with the GPS providing fairly accurate readings with the slider
closed and the phone in a carrier on my belt.
While GPS rarely works indoors, no matter how good the GPS device you have is, I nonetheless tried the N95 inside the Williams Coffee Pub near Sherway Gardens. Even standing in line (right in the middle of the building) I was able to lock onto 7 satellites within just 20 seconds or so.
If you search the internet you'll find many reviewers complaining of poor or
flaky GPS performance. All of these reviews are of the N95-1 or N95-2. I don't
whether or not the GPS was changed substantially for the N95-4, but the receiver
on mine was nothing short of phenomenal.
Nokia provides their own mapping software with the phone, but for day-to-day use
it really can’t touch the Symbian version of Google Maps (which you can
easily add for free). However, the Nokia mapping software does provide a
3D-style view (similar to what you get with the PC-based Google Earth
application) and you can subscribe to turn-by-turn directions using the GPS
receiver.
Operating System: The N95 uses the Symbian S60
3rd Edition O/S running on a 330 MHz processor. Symbian is a fully open platform that not only allows 3rd party
developers to do some pretty amazing things, but it actively encourages them to.
From a computer-geek point-of-view, the Symbian O/S is quite exciting.
It’s a multi-tasking environment that allows multiple applications to be opened
at one time, and applets can run as background tasks. There is 128 MB of RAM in
the N95, allowing it to run from 10 to 20 applets simultaneously (depending upon
the memory footprint and processor load of each applet). While the iPhone's OS-X
operation system might actually be capable of this, Apple doesn't allow the
iPhone to open more than one applet at a time.
The O/S supports software written in native Symbian (C++), J2ME (Java), and Python (with the addition of a free Python runtime engine). Programs written under Symbian can interact directly with the O/S to provide some rather classy additions to the phone. For example, an application I downloaded (from a 3rd party vendor) called “T9 Nav” works invisibly in the background to provide a system-wide search that is activated by just pressing numeric keys in the standby screen. It quickly finds all phonebook entries, applications, videos, pictures, presentations, etc that contain a substring based on the keys you type in from the keypad (as though you were entering a wording using T9 predictive text input).
I will however concede that the menu system on Symbian phones is quite daunting
for a beginner, and in this regard the iPhone wins hands-down. However, once you
get the hang of where most things are (or use something like "T9 Nav" to help
you find stuff) the going gets much easier and you tend not to be concerned
about the U/I.
FM Radio: Like many Nokia phones before it, the N95
comes with a built-in FM radio receiver. All you need to do to use it is to plug
in a wired headset (as the phone requires the wiring to the headset or earbuds as an
FM antenna). The receiver isn’t the most sensitive I’ve ever seen, but it pulls
in signals cleanly and provides quite decent audio quality (limited of course to
the quality of the station you tune to).
Internet Radio: Nokia does not natively provide
anything in this department, but I downloaded an applet from them that provides an excellent
Shoutcast-compatible application called Nokia Internet Radio. It can stream music from any
of thousands of free online radio stations. It can do this in the background,
though certain functions of the phone do demand a lot of processor time and you
can occasionally cause the music to pause when the phone runs other applications. The
applet provides an extensive directory (which it updates online), but you
can also hand-enter any Shoutcast station you like.
YouTube: Although Nokia doesn't provide an application for
accessing YouTube content, I downloaded a free Java applet directly from YouTube that I used instead
and that works exceptionally well on the N95. My favorite YouTube application
for the N95 however is Mobitubia, which provides a rich graphical
interface to YouTube that actually looks better than most other applications on
the phone.
MP3 Player: The N95 comes with an excellent music
player that many Rogers customers will probably never discover. The lame excuse
for a music player that Rogers puts on the phone (and adds to one of the
softkeys from the idle screen) is vastly inferior to the one provided by Nokia.
Fortunately that native player is still shipped with the N95 sold by Rogers and
it’s fairly easy to change the softkey assignments or add a shortcut to the
proper player.
The native Nokia player uses the ID3 tags in the songs to gather the track name, artist, genre, and album name so that you can search your music library in many different ways. You can also create your own playlists and customize your listening experience. While the U/I doesn't match an iPod, the N95 makes a terrific music player that runs in the background, allowing you to continue using the phone for whatever else you're doing with it.
MP3 playback is not interfered with by
processor-intensive applications, and so music runs interrupted unless you make
or receive a call. Once the call is over the music is turned back on and the
volume is gradually put back to where you had it, so that it doesn't just blast
your ears all of a sudden.
Headphones: The stereo earbuds that come with the
N95 aren’t of particularly high quality, and so you’re probably going to want to
toss them out and use something better. The great news is that the N95 has a
3.5-mm smart jack on the side that can be used for a large assortment of audio
and video devices.
If you plug a set of standard stereo headphones/earbuds directly into the jack the phone will ask you want you are connecting. Since a standard headset doesn’t contain a microphone, the N95 will use the internal mic (set to speakerphone sensitivity) when a call comes in. Also provided with the phone is a little control unit you can clip on yourself that contains media control buttons, an answer-phone button, volume controls, and a built-in microphone. It then provides a 3.5-mm jack to connect your headset to.
If you'd prefer not to be wired-up to your phone however, the N95 supports the
A2DP Bluetooth profile, thus allowing you to listen to high-quality stereo sound
wirelessly. Sadly the phone (or its built-in music player) does not seem to support RDS, which is a protocol
used to send track information to a Bluetooth device. The lack of this feature
isn't really a deal-breaker however, since the sound quality on A2DP is
excellent and you still have full volume, pause/play/stop, fast forward, and
rewind control through A2DP devices.
TV Out: At first I wasn’t sure this was a
particularly useful idea, but once I played with it I was convinced that all
multimedia phones should have one of these things. The phone comes with a cable
that has a 3.5-mm jack on one end and 3 color-coded RCA jacks on the other. Just
plug those cables into your TV’s video and audio inputs and you can view the
phone’s screen on your TV and hear the audio through the TV's stereo speakers. This is great for showing off pictures to a large
crowd, playing the excellent 30-frame-per-second videos the phone can record,
and for displaying the output of any piece of software running on your phone
(like Google Maps, etc).
The same cable can be used to connect the phone to stereo equipment to play
music. Just ignore the yellow video cable and plug in the two audio jacks
directly into the input of a stereo amplifier. Sound quality is excellent.
Podcasts: Okay, everyone knows that Podcasts are
just MP3 or video files distributed by their producers and you can certainly
download them manually at any time. However, Nokia provides their own Podcast
download software that lets you subscribe to any Podcast via their RSS feeds and have
new ones downloaded automatically when they become available.
WiFi: The N95 includes an 802.11b/g WiFi
device built-in. While the 6-GB-per-month data plan presently offered by Rogers
gives you tons of data to play with, you might have plenty of reasons for
wanting the faster (and usually free) connection provided by WiFi. There’s even
a 3rd party program available that will turn your N95 into a WiFi hotspot so
that other people with laptops can directly share your 3G connection. How cool
is that?
Home Media: This is a service that allows uPnP
devices hooked up to a WiFi network to be used to play various types of media.
When you are connected to a WiFi network you can stream audio and video from the
N95 directly to one of these Home Media devices.
Email Support: The N95 comes with native support
for iMAP/POP3/SMTP mail clients (3rd party software is available for Microsoft
Exchange support). The email system is integrated into the operating system, and
so many applications have direct access to sending their content as email
attachments if you
so choose.
Web Browsing: The provided Nokia web browser is
actually pretty decent, though it certainly doesn't look as good as Safari provided in
the iPhone. Like many phone-based browsers you have the option of displaying
pages in their true representation, or reformatted to be friendlier to the small
screens. I personally prefer the reformatted mode for most pages, though some
work best when displayed in their native format.
I don't prefer it for displaying WAP pages however.
For that I recommend that you download Opera Mini, which runs extremely well on
the N95 under its support for J2ME (Java) applets. And if you want to take it a
step further, you can buy a copy of the full-blown Opera browser.
Bluetooth: Unlike the iPhone, which has Bluetooth
more-or-less only to support standard BT headsets, the N95 includes virtually
all Bluetooth profiles, including:
- A2DP (high-quality stereo headsets)
- Audio/Video Remote Control
- Basic Imaging
- Basic Printing
- File Transfer Protocol
- Dialup Networking (tethering)
- Hands free
- Headset
- Human Interface Device
- Object Push (OBEX)
- SIM Access
- Synchronization
Suspicious by its absence is RDS, which I mentioned in the section on the MP3
Player.
Tethering: The N95 supports the tethering of a
laptop computer using a USB cable, Bluetooth, or the aforementioned software for
turning the phone into a WiFi hotspot.
Conclusions
It took me a while to warm up to it, but I got to like the N95 so much during the trial that I decided to buy one for myself. I got mine through Treatz, who many people know well from Howard Forums. I've long been a fan of Nokia phones, but over the last few years they've managed to produce far too many phones that just didn't click with me. Not so with the N95.
I would have preferred a slightly more comfortable earpiece, slightly richer sound, a better keypad, and maybe a kick-ass user interface like on the iPhone, but overall I can’t think of much else I don’t like. Just the excellent camera and video recording functionality of the device alone are almost enough to be worth the price of admission, especially at just $200.
