The original N95 was a revelation for smartphone users. Pre-dating the iPhone, it was one of the first mobiles to feature HSDPA, Wi-Fi and GPS, and it also packed an industry-leading five-megapixel camera and a design optimised for multimedia. An update to the N95, the N95 8GB, added a larger 2.8in screen and an 8GB flash drive.


But a year and a half later, the features that made the N95 such an amazing device aren’t as exciting any more, and phones like the iPhone 3G have really raised the bar for what constitutes an impressive mobile. It’s in this ultra-competitive environment that Nokia has released the N95’s successor, the N96.

Design

As Nokia’s flagship phone, we expected stunning aesthetics, innovative controls, and other delicious eye candy, enough to make everyone that didn’t own one green with envy. Alas, the N96 is remarkably plain-looking. It looks like your everyday slider phone, and it’s chunky besides, measuring nearly two centimetres thick. It’s available in a single colour, black, with a champagne-coloured strip around the middle and an in-laid wave pattern on the back.

Compared to the N95 8GB, it’s slightly thinner and marginally taller, and weighs a couple of grams less at 125g. It also uses the same dual slider design, revealing a standard numeric keypad when slid one way and a set of multimedia buttons at the other end. And just in case you missed the point about the N96 being a media-centric mobile, there are also playback buttons around the navigation pad.

Nokia should’ve stuck to the one set of media buttons at the top end of the slider – with the extra set of keys on the N96’s face, there isn’t as much room for all the other controls, particularly the highly-trafficked Answer and End call buttons, which have been shunted off to the sides as thin vertically-oriented buttons. The soft keys, Menu button and Clear button are also cramped, and on more than a few occasions we accidentally hit the wrong buttons.

Those upgrading from the N95 8GB will be disappointed to find no change in the N96’s screen – it’s the same 2.8in non-touchscreen QVGA display with support for 16 million colours. A built-in accelerometer automatically switches the orientation to landscape when you hold it sideways, but we found this to be more of an annoyance than a perk, as it only detected we were holding it sideways half the time. Two cool extras are the kick stand on the back for propping it up to watch movies, and the ‘breathing light’ around the navigation button – a very Apple-like feature – which pulses a steady white light to let you know the phone is still switched on.

User interface

The N96 is run by the Series 60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 operating system, which uses a stock-standard standby screen, soft keys and an icon-driven main menu. The Standby screen has a configurable row of program shortcuts and information panels that include upcoming appointments, a search bar and currently playing music. One of the new additions to Feature Pack 2 is the use of three soft keys – in addition to the left and right soft keys, there’s also a key in the middle that corresponds to the Select button.

Series 60’s simplicity is a bit deceptive though – commonly-used applications like the web browser, messaging and the music player are available at the first layer of the main menu, but lots of other programs and options are haphazardly scattered throughout the menu system and buried under multiple layers. There’s also a lot of duplicated functionality (two media browsers, for instance) and a lack of consistency between each application.

One good thing about the N96’s interface is that it’s extremely customisable – more so than smartphones from any other platform. You can change the system theme for different icons, menu background and highlight colour, change the standby and menu screen layouts, specify your own image as wallpaper, and organise applications to your own tastes by moving icons around and creating new folders.



Another improvement in Feature Pack 2 is the option to set the default connection method for certain programs like the web browser and email the first time you use them. Previously, you had to either select the connection method each time you wanted to go online or jump through three hoops and a ring of blazing fire to set a connection as the default one for each application.

Multimedia

Boasting a 16GB flash drive, the N96 matches the iPhone for built-in storage – but one-ups it by offering a microSDHC expansion slot. SanDisk’s recent announcement of a 16GB microSD card (at an affordably-priced $141) means the N96 can store a maximum of 32GB-worth of multimedia – which, up until not long ago, is more than what was on offer in the entry-level iPod classic.




We can draw another parallel to the iPhone 3G with the Nokia Music Store, which is similar to iTunes in that you can buy music directly from the phone, but unlike the iPhone, you can use any connection for downloading music. The N96 also comes with a $20 voucher for buying music. The N96’s music player supports MP3, AAC, eAAC+, WMA and WMA DRM formats, the latter being the format used for songs bought through the Nokia Music Store.

The dual stereo speakers pack a serious punch when it comes to volume, but they’re lacking in bass, and the higher frequencies are jarring when it’s on the maximum volume level. It also supports wired headphones via the 3.5mm headphone jack and wireless headphones and speakers via Bluetooth A2DP.

As a video player, the N96 certainly passes muster – especially with the handy integrated kickstand – but the 2.8in screen is a little small for watching full-length movies. For videos stored on your PC, Nokia PC Suite makes it a no-brainer to convert them to a compatible format (supported codecs are H.263/SP, H.264/AVC, WMV9, and RealVideo).

Regions that support DVB-H can take advantage of the N96’s Live TV feature for watching digital broadcasts. Unfortunately Australia isn’t one of those regions. There are still a few links to this feature throughout the menu system, though, so there’s potential for confusion. As a consolation prize, N96 owners can download one of four full seasons of BBC shows, including Little Britain and the Catherine Tate Show. We opted for the latter, and the entire season was 1.1GB to download. The clips are excellent quality and fill the entire screen – unlike for movies, we found the screen was just the right size for watching short TV shows.

The Video Centre offers a directory of video feeds that you can subscribe to, such as YouTube Mobile Videos (a limited subset of what’s on offer from the main site) and ‘mobisodes’ from the TV show ‘24’, but the quality leaves a lot to be desired. Even when streaming from a Wi-Fi network, there was lots of buffering and rendering issues. But at least the videos actually loaded – when we tried streaming clips from YouTube’s mobile web site, only the audio would play in RealPlayer.

Camera

The N95 was widely held to be one of the best cameraphones available, and the N96 hasn’t deviated much from its predecessor. It has the same five-megapixel sensor with auto-focus and Carl Zeiss Optics, but the flash has been bumped up to a dual-LED to enhance its low-light performance.





The camera offers just as many features as a mid-range compact camera, and overall we were pleased with the results, although it’s still not a match for a standalone camera. The N96 excels at close-up shots in optimal natural lighting, and colours are accurate and natural. Like most high-end camera phones, it also offers an auto-focus feature that triggers when you press the shutter button halfway, just don’t expect crystal-clear shots every time – it works better the more lighting you have, but even during the day we noticed blurriness around the edges.

The dual-LED flash is good for illuminating an object up to a metre away without blowing out the colours, but beyond that photos fall victim to the usual night-time fuzziness. 





Calling the video recording ‘DVD quality’ is a stretch, but the camera deals with motion and audio very well for a mobile. Videos are recorded in MPEG4 at 640 x 480 resolution and 30 frames per second, and you can record for as long as there’s free space available. Our 7.5 minute video took up 86MB of memory. Overall we found video recording to be on-par with the quality from a compact digital camera.

Web browser

A 2.8in display isn’t the ideal size for viewing web sites formatted for desktop viewing, but the Nokia Web Browser does a good job at making the most of the limited space. By default, it presents a portion of the page from the top left-hand corner, and you can pan around using the Mini Map, which shows a thumbnail overlay of the page that you can use for zooming in on a particular section.

The browser technically supports tabs for multiple pages, but, strangely, the feature is only used for pop-ups. For jumping between sites, the browser keeps a history of sites you’ve visited in the same session (represented as thumbnails), and you can move and back and forth between them.





The web browser supports full HTML, JavaScript and Flash video (courtesy of Flash Lite 3.0), and it does the job for most pages by keeping all the original formatting and style intact. We had no problems firing up internet banking web sites and the main news sites (most of which load using the mobile version of the site), but APCmag.com would repeatedly crash the browser – a problem that isn’t replicated when visiting the same page on the iPhone’s Safari browser. Also, it’s slow to load graphics and Java-intensive pages.

GPS

The N96 is equipped with a GPS receiver and Nokia Maps 2.0 application, with maps for Australia and New Zealand preloaded into the built-in storage. It comes with a complimentary three months of Drive & Walk turn-by-turn navigation, after which you need to shell out a little over a hundred dollars a year to subscribe to this feature.



The application itself is fairly basic – you can view the maps in 2D, 3D, satellite and hybrid, search an online points of interest database, select a transport mode (drive or walk) and specify whether you’d like to avoid motorways, tunnels and ferries, but advanced features like text-to-speech, swappable voices and traffic assistance aren’t available.

We were surprised to find the N96 comes with a car charger but no car mount. We’d definitely recommend a mount as an extra accessory, though, as the N96 is impressive as an in-car navigator. The external speaker is incredibly powerful, and the voice guidance warns you of close consecutive turns in ample time so you know which lane to be in.

Using the assisted GPS feature we were able to get a signal lock from cold boot in 20 seconds. It’s sensitive enough to be used indoors – we were able to get a signal from a ground-floor unit while sitting next to a window – and rerouting is speedy.  Our only qualm is Nokia Maps’ implementation of landscape view. The accelerometer automatically switches the display orientation to landscape when you hold the N96 sideways, but you actually see less of the map as a third of the screen becomes dedicated to the information panel.

Gaming

N-gage is the mobile gaming platform that Nokia launched earlier this year, and it operates similar to Xbox Live in that you get your own gaming profile and you can compete and chat with other players. The software, while pretty, isn’t particularly intuitive to use, and we had no luck creating a new profile to access the online Arena.



Still, it works fine for single-player gaming. You can download trial versions of 20 games, including Tetris, World Series of Poker Pro Challenge, Star Wars Force Unleashed Mobile and Brothers in Arms – full licenses cost between $12 and $16, and you can also purchase one day and seven day passes. As for payment options, you can choose to pay via credit card or your phone bill.

The variety isn’t much compared to dedicated portable games consoles like the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS, but unlike those two, you can access the online gaming network from anywhere thanks to the prevalent 3G connection – if you can actually access the N-gage Arena, that is – and buy games on the fly. The controls and screen orientation differ between each game, but none of them use the N96’s accelerometer – which makes sense given they’re meant to work across a variety of Nokia handsets.

The games aren’t much different to the Java-based ones you can download through carrier portals, with an emphasis on short spurts of gaming rather than epic-long sessions, but the graphics and audio are in the same league as the Nintendo DS. The main limitation is the use of a numeric keypad instead of a dedicated controller. For some reason, landscape-oriented games have the keypad to the left-hand side of the screen, which can be clumsy to use for right-handers, but an option is available to flip the orientation around to the other side.

Messaging

The Messaging application is a one-stop shop for SMS, MMS and email. The bare basics are covered, but it’s missing a few of the extra frills that we’ve come to expect from a high-end smartphone. For SMS, it doesn’t support threaded messaging – a feature that’s standard on Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and iPhone.



On the email side, it supports POP3, IMAP4, and SMTP out of the box, and Exchange ActiveSync can be added with the free Mail for Exchange program that you need to download and install separately. Again, Nokia has opted for simplicity, with email displayed as plain text (emails formatted in HTML or rich text are displayed as attachments to the main message). Most file attachments can be opened using the N96’s built-in software, however the Quickoffice 4 suite for handling Word, Excel and PowerPoint files only supports read-only access out of the box. For editing and document creation capabilities, you’ll need to fork out an extra $48, and for Office 2007 file support, you need to upgrade to Quickoffice 5, which costs a budget-busting $98.70.

Performance

We weren't able to get confirmation from Nokia as to the processor used in the N96, but reports on the web claim that it uses a 264MHz ARM 9 Dual CPU – an odd choice given that its predecessor, the N95 8GB, used a faster 332MHz chip. We found the N96 to be snappy for the most part, although there was a definite lag when pressing multimedia buttons.

Our review unit ran software version 10.065.098.1 out of the box, and while it wasn’t a 100% stable (the system froze a few times during testing), it’s no less buggy than previous versions of the Series 60 operating system. Thankfully, the ‘out of memory’ errors that plagued the original N95 are a thing of the past. The web browser crashed a few times during testing as well.

When it comes to phone performance, we had no complaints. Signal reception and call quality are both excellent, and the loud external speaker makes the speakerphone function a delight to use. On the same token, ring tones are almost obnoxiously loud, so you won’t have any problem hearing incoming calls when it’s buried in a bag or you’re in a loud environment.

Battery

With all the functions crammed into the N96, you’d think it would come with a beefy battery to sustain it throughout the day – a reasonable thought given that many of the latest smartphones like the BlackBerry Bold and Palm Treo Pro come equipped with batteries that are 1,400mAh and over.

Sadly, the N96 only comes with a puny 950mAh lithium ion cell, which, according to the spec sheet, is good for 2.6 hours of talk time and 8 days of standby over 3G. In practice, we weren’t able to get a full 24 hours out of a fully charged battery. Our testing period consisted of 20 minutes worth of phone calls, 30 text messages and half an hour of web browsing, and the battery lasted a feeble 18 hours before it gave up the ghost. This should get marginally better as the battery gets conditioned, but you’ll still need to stick it in the charger every night so you don’t run out of power.

Verdict

The N96 is an evolutionary upgrade to the N95, and as such, owners of the latter phone shouldn’t see much need to rush out and buy the new model. Judged on its own merits, the N96 is one of the most powerful smartphones on the market, offering a trifecta of Wi-Fi, HSDPA and A-GPS, a five-megapixel camera and 16GB flash drive with microSD expansion. Most users probably won’t scratch the surface of everything the N96 is capable of, but power users will have a field day with all of its features.

We do wish that Nokia had put more effort into sexing the hardware design up – it lacks the wow appeal that you’d reasonably expect for a phone that retails for $1,349. A larger battery would also be ideal, but give that it’s already quite chunky with the smaller 950mAh cell, we can appreciate that this would’ve made the N96 even fatter.