Nokia N96 - Review

Nokia N96 - Review Welcome to the Phone Arena.com review of the Nokia N96. The N96 is upgraded to the N95 8 GB and most notably includes 8 more gigs of memory for a total of 16 as well as DVB-H TV. Its features are completely redesigned. As you can see the space of the phone is almost completely flushed. All we see is the raised directional pad as well as the multimedia shortcut key. The same applies for the keys of the keypad. Everything is flushed and the only thing raised is a little two prongs here on a five key. This makes texting without looking extremely hard and actually pretty much makes it impossible. Like the N95, the N96 is a dual slider and when slide down it reveals multimedia keys. These are also used for engage games. You can see there are also multimedia keys here around the directional pad which can be use when the phone is closed. This albeit eliminates the need for these keys over here as multimedia keys and then in the future we would expect to see them more that more used and engaged applications rather than music. The N96 does have a built-in accelerometer however that’s not enabled by default. As you can see, sometimes it can be a bit slow. On the left side of the phone you find simply a micro-SD expansion port. This means that combined with the 16GB internal memory users can currently have up to 28 GB’s on their phone with the 12GB card. Add to that the theoretical capacity of microSDHC which is 32GB’s and the user can have a 48GB PMP player. At the top of the phone features a slider lock switch, a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack which also serves as video out that included our CA cables and a small power switch. At the bottom has 2 millimeter Nokia charging pin and a micro USB data port. The phone can also charge of the data cable. The right side of the phone features the volume rocker and the camera key. You can also see the stereo speakers at the top and bottom on the right side. It seems an odd place to put them until you figure out that is designed to be use sideways. In this orientation is where we’re going to watching video and another nice feature for video is the stand. It simply pops out and you can set the phone down and watch TV or preloaded videos. It doesn’t seem like much but it is a very nice feature. Well, actually we have a five megapixel camera with dual LED flash. It again features Carl Zeiss optics. Unfortunately as we said, it shoots the dual LED flash and not as seen on flash found on the N82. Overall we are not crazy about the design of the N96. It's definitely better than what we’ve seen in the past we cut this at the row. Overall there is not a whole lot to say about the interface. It runs Symbian S60 and it has a feature factory. You’ve seen this on several other phones and there isn’t really a whole lot to report here. One nice thing that we do like is the multimedia shortcut key. Once we push that you will see of a little bit of a lag. We have shortcut to a video, music, photos, games, maps, internet, contacts, and back to TV and video. You can see that the animations run fairly smoothly. It’s a really nice feature. However, we did experience some like it at times. The layout on the whole is pretty much what we’ve seen in the past. It can be viewed on portrait or landscape mode as the accelerometer catches up with us here. We are not sure of the accelerometer lag as related to less processing power or not. Sometimes it is a quick but other times as you just saw, it takes a while to switch. Going through the menu, we know it's considerably less like. Sometimes when opening the applications we will find that but on the whole we are very pleased with the operating system. It's extremely powerful. It allows the user to have a full Smartphone along with upgradeable content and user content. The web browser is a WebKit based as always and we don’t have any issues with it. It's not quite as easy to use and say the iPhone or even Windows Mobile programs such as Skyfire but it’s very serviceable in render in our PhoneArena.com page with no problems. The N-series is a line of converge devices meaning that not only are they smart phones but are also meant to be media players, web browsers and cameras. All in all, the N-series represents the best converge of devices out there although the iPhone in recent competition from Samsung and HTC is given the Nokia run for its money. Here we are looking at the music player which we really like. It's extremely well laid out and very simple to use. Some quality was very good. We have no issues with anything except for it now and again we wouldn’t have our mark for the music that we loaded. The included speakers are very loud and most too applauded sometimes but they definitely got the job done. When plug into the standard headphones that it comes with and the Nokia N96 didn’t sound all that great. However when we switch over to our post headphones the sound greatly improved and we put it at least on par with the iPod. The bass was rich, the highs were high and overall we really like it. Another important aspect of a converged device is videos. Here Nokia has their video center. Unfortunately we’re touching this in the United States, so we can’t try out the DVB-H mobile TV. However what we did and see we really like. There are all kinds of streaming videos and off course we can load our own videos as well. Odyssey is a test video here and you can see that the video starts in mostly full screen and then it will eventually sound to completely pause it. We are not sure how well this looks on the camera but to us the video is bright and crisp. It’s not quite as clear as the iPhone videos. We are not sure if it is because the iPhone does has a bigger screen or if they just have a little bit better process and capability. However this will definitely replaced regular PMP. As a converged device, the N96 is very good. The music and video players stuck up to anything out there in the market even up with the top of the top. We gladly put up with a little bit of the sacrifice quality for carrying one device. The five megapixel camera for the N95 returns still with the Carl Zeiss optics. It has been upgraded to duality flash but we will prefer to seen on flash. It’s got auto focus and auto exposure. To activate it you could simply press and hold the button for a second. We really just liked this camera button. The trouble on it is very long and being small that makes it hard to press with the same feelings about the power button at the top. As you can see the interface takes up the entire screen. It's very simple, well laid out and easy to use. All the features are listed along beside here and as we scroll down, you can see there are more than what we see it immediately. There’s also an options menu which allows us to change things such as the image quality and where we record the pictures too. In our testing, the camera results were very good, easily good enough to replace our point and shoot camera. At far distances or in high zoom mode, the images weren’t great but for an all-in-one device it was pretty fantastic. Videos can be recorded at VGA quality in 30 frames per second and we were extremely impressed with them. All in all we do like the Nokia N36. It's a fantastic that converged device that offers just about anything the user can want and it really does replace any other electronic devices that the users has. However like Apple and the iPhone 3G, we feel that is more of a lateral step as oppose to a movement forward. For those of you who already have an N95 we’d say stick with what would you have. There aren’t a whole lot of great upgrades. The increased memory and memory card slot is a nice feature as the DVB-H. However especially for US users who won’t get 3G there is really no reason to upgrade. For first time buyers if you're looking to replace everything, the N96 should be at the top of your list for phone to buy.