Menu, hardware

There is Symbian 9.3 working under the hood and it of course has Feature Pack 2. It is highly customizable as ever, but the menu doesn’t know anything more than an N78. The QVGA resolution and the 2.8” diagonal provide great readability and with the themes anyone can create any kind of graphical presets.

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Active standby can be sliding in from the side, this new Symbian is really so easy to use that it only misses touchscreen support. The navigation button really “breathes”, there is a white light getting turned on and off around it, and if the phone wants to remind us of a missed event this happens faster.

Surprisingly N96 has a weaker CPU than its predecessor. This time there is a 264 MHz Dual ARM 9 CPU working inside, which lacks 3D accelerator modules. This makes us ask lots of questions, for example why did this happen this way: this – in our opinion – has/might have two reasons. On one hand it consumes less power. Lots of people have been cursing N95 (and I have to say they were right) because it went offline in a short time. The other reason is probably cost-reduction, although I usually don’t visit the shop to buy ARM CPUs for dinner, but I can imagine that a weaker one costs less.

How does this influence the phone’s speed? Well, at first I’d say that it doesn’t. The 128 MB of RAM is enough to let frequently used applications run in the background, but the handset won’t slow down even if we want to launch a program that is not yet open. But this is only true for the basic apps, poor N96 takes a lot of time launch games, it gets together the list of available pictures, music and videos slowly, it thinks a lot when using Nokia Maps, although boot is surprisingly fast in this case. Here you can see a 10 minute video:

So the weaker hardware doesn’t have an incredible downside during everyday use, but it rarely happened that a new handset is a step backwards in some parts, compared to its direct predecessor. But let’s mention the positive aspects too: the motion sensor is fast, we have to tilt the phone to the right in order to activate it and it accustoms the displayed picture to the handset’s changed position at almost every point of the menu system.

But let’s waste no time, here are some benchmarks:

A cikk még nem ért véget, kérlek, lapozz!