Introduction

When writing a review of a top model phone, one has to be very cautious. This is even truer when the manufacturer is Nokia. Another extra is that the predecessor, N95, was one of the most successful handsets of its time. This is no wonder. N95 has been the most anticipated phone before iPhone, although there was of course no such hype surrounding it as in the case of Apple’s best-seller. Still, many have thought of it as the perfect mobile phone, although such a thing doesn’t exist.

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The box from XXL GSM has arrived on Wednesday and it had a couple of days of stay in the trunk of my car until I made up my mind to write the review. It seemed to be a hard thing, as it’s the current top model, its price is above €625 EUR, but then I got used to it and I’ve figured out that this is nothing extra, it just has everything that Nokia used in other handsets. Nothing more.

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Of course, it’s a good thing if our phone has lots of features. We are usually angry when a Walkman phone performs poorly in photography or when a handset designed for navigation doesn’t really have musical features. N96 theoretically has the maximum from all points of view… but there is a price to be paid for this. We spend extra money for such features that are used only by a small percent of the users. Anyway, Nokia doesn’t want to commit a mistake: they’ve put everything in it.

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It is sure that the Finnish designers knew almost exactly what they did wrong with the predecessor. Those that worked and worked fine are still here, and those that were criticized are now fixed, or at least they’ve tried to fix it. Still, they didn’t have to change a lot, N96 will be a bestseller model, it’s evident that the name would sell the successor even if it would be the original one repacked in a different case.

Exterior – front cover

There are lots of useful gadgets in the box besides the phone. Even the manual is cool, there are separate ones for N-Gage, OVI, the phone and there is a getting started guide, so we get about 200 pages of material on the whole. Besides the phone there is a headset made of two parts, a USB cable, a TV-out cable, a charger and – wow! – a car charger, which doesn’t cost a lot, but it’s great that they have included it.

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N96 is quite a large brick. It has increased in width and height, but it’s 3 mm slimmer than N95 8 GB, which is not too much, but considering the other two size changes it provides a completely different character to the phone. There is one more reason to this: the sliding front cover is not such a slim piece of plastic anymore, but it’s a much more massive thing. This increases the feeling of quality, and although the cover is still not rock solid, it has some play only if forced really hard.

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The display is huge, the QVGA resolution might even be a bit too low for the 2.8” diagonal. Still, I can’t complain about it and the designers have even managed to cram 11 buttons below it, which might sound terrifying, but it’s no problem, really. The center of the navigation key has just the proper size, the function keys, the call handling keys, the clear key and the menu control are evenly distributed on the two sides. Around the navigation ring there are the multimedia control keys with a discrete backlight, while on the right there is a dedicated silvery key that takes us to the multimedia menu – we could have seen a similar thing on a couple of Nokia phones.

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There is no light sensor above the screen this time, but there is a secondary camera, which might come in handy for video calls. The whole cover has a shiny black surface, which is a real, hardcore fingerprint-magnet, even more since the screen is not sunk, so it gets dirty easily. It’s a smart solution that the surface around the navigation ring gets deeper inwards, so we can feel it more easily where we should be tapping.

Exterior – case, buttons

There is only the thick door of the memory card on the left side of the phone, but this seems thick only until we want to open it as then it turns out that there is a really thin band connecting it to the case. On the right there is much more stuff, as this is where we can see the volume control keys and the camera’s hotkey. On the top and the bottom there are speakers trying to create a stereo effect.

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On top of N96 there are three, well-separated features. In the center there is the 3.5 mm jack output, on the right we can see the peg of the keypad lock, this isn’t activated easily, but given its function this is no problem. On the left we can see the usual power and profile switcher key. There is nothing special on the bottom, N96 has a microUSB connector with the usual charger input near it. Ha-ha, yeah it needs a charger as N96 cannot be charged via microUSB either.

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The back might be the lowest quality part of the whole phone. On one hand the plastic used is really low-quality, it’s quite slim and the process of taking it off is not worthy of such a top model. There is a kind of unfastener, but the whole thing still cracks and pops. I had some problems with the design too, as the camera’s lens is embossed and there’s nothing to protect it from getting dirty.

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The cover can be slid in two directions, just like on N95. When pushing it upwards we can see the bit wide, but logical keypad, which has two defects. On one hand the keys are in the same plane, there is no embossment, and on the other hand our fingers might hit the bottom of the cover when using the top row of keys. It turns out that there is a light sensor somewhere, as the backlight of the keypad is controlled by the software, based on some kind of data.

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When pushing the cover down we get music and video control buttons. The software doesn’t react to this movement, so it won’t take us to the multimedia menu, it doesn’t even rotate the screen. The four black buttons doesn’t have a crucial role, they can be accessed by pushing the rim of the navigation ring, they are here probably to conserve traditions.

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: