Nokia N96 - back to the future

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:

Wow… you can see it, can’t you? N96 performs about half as good on the tests as its predecessors. The facts are some stubborn things, I’ve ran all tests twice on an offline phone, so yes: no matter the Dual ARM, unfortunately the top model is slower than its predecessor. Much slower.

Basic functions

It’s a Symbian so there aren’t any surprises regarding the basic features and we won’t be disappointed either, the system performs really well in these things. I have mentioned the themes, we have profiles too, we can even set the phone to pronounce (let’s be righteous: tries to normally pronounce) the caller’s name if it’s on our contact list.

The phonebook has all the features one would expect nowadays. Its capacity is practically unlimited, we can define the number and type of extra information assigned to contacts, there are no limits. This is of course a good reason to copy contacts from the SIM card to the internal memory, although N96 can display contents of both memories. The images attached to contacts are displayed as thumbnails in the phonebook (only if a contact with an image is selected), but in case of a call the photos are displayed fullscreen (yes, on the whole 2.8 inches). This is quite an impressive view.

Messaging is prime quality. Text entry is a bit problematic because of the buttons and although I have been telling of the keypad a couple of paragraphs before, this can be felt only after N95, otherwise typing is absolutely okay. When creating a new message an icon bar automatically appears in the bottom if we decide to attach multimedia content and from there it’s child’s play. Of course we don’t have only SMS and MMS, but there is an email client too, which supports all kinds of authentications and attachments. We can set our signature, mail check interval (it’s great that we can disable it when on roaming), maximum size, so there’s really nothing to complain about.

Volume and sound quality during calls is okay. There’s no distortion, it’s not too soft, it doesn’t echo; handsfree mode is not that good, but there’s no distortion here either. It’s a useful thing (and this is no new feature, but many people have been asking about it so we’ll mention it) that the voice recorder can record the call in progress too.

Photo

There is a 5 megapixel camera on the back of the phone (just like on N95) and the software barely changed since then. N96 has the same settings as its predecessors, with the exception that ISO cannot have only three values, but it can be 100, 200, 400 or 800 if we don’t use the automatics. The problem might be with me, but I just cannot interpret the software’s explanations, as there are two “high” values, both use ISO 800, but one of them is “higher”, it’s more sensitive. How can there be any difference between two same settings (ISO 800) if nothing else is changed?

Anyway, this is no big deal, let’s start taking some pictures, which is of course done in landscape mode. The first positive aspect is that focusing and exposure are surprisingly fast and storing pictures doesn’t take too much either. Camera sound cannot be turned off, we shouldn’t expect optical zoom and unfortunately the flash is made of two quite powerful LEDs, which is not suitable for covering an area larger than a standard paper tissue.

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We’ve been lucky enough to have a bad weather for weeks that made us more depressed than an Amy Winhouse – Lindsey Lohan lesbian show, so the grey color is quite dominant on the test pictures. But no problem, this should be the real challenge for a good lens! Well, well… test pictures below:

We can see that N96 won’t redeem the world. We know (and this is quite sad) that the Finnish designers never really succeed in making a good first software version, but this time we can’t even say that we have a sample phone that is made for the Asian market. This handset is a European model, sold in Hungary. No, there was no foil on the lens. Yes, I have used auto mode. And yes, all pictures are as if they were taken from the bottom of a bucket of sour cream.

Audio-video

After the multimedia menu comes up, we can see the quadratic interface we could have seen on N95 8 GB. This can be rotated like a roundabout, so we cannot browse only the main functions, but also the submenus connected to them. Of course it’s not obligatory to use this whenever we’re looking for musical or video contents, as the music player, the radio or the video player can be accessed from the main menu too.

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Music is the best with a headset, it’s not so good on the handsfree (of course it’s not bad for a phone), the headset is included is medium-quality, but it can be taken apart, so we can use any kind of headset plugged directly in the phone or as a lengthener for the default headset’s controller part. The player is very simple, it has all the features one could expect, it displays album covers, lists tracks by ID3 tags, it can run in the background, it has repeat and shuffle modes. I might not even have to mention that there is stereo Bluetooth support too. The equalizer has eight bands, there are factory presets, but we can create custom ones too. We can configure which of our ears is weaker and on that side the music will be louder; there is wide stereo, which I think should rather be called “swimming-pool” mode, as it just echoes the volume.

This is where I should mention that we again have 3D ringtones that cannot be used for anything, but the SMS reader is practical, it can read out messages loud (English only). The built-in FM radio can work in two modes; there is a Visual version which requires this service to be available in the given region, and there is an Internet Radio, which doesn’t receive broadcast via the headset, but from the Internet. A simple 3G is enough for this, but HSDPA is quite a wide-spread technology too nowadays. There is no RDS feature in any of them, but when choosing the first one (Visual) the handset can download the list of available radio stations at our location, so we don’t have to manually tune it.

The phone can record videos in VGA resolution (almost one and a half hours of video can be recorded on the 16 GB of internal storage when setting the lowest quality) and they can be played back full-screen, landscape mode. In the Video central we cannot only play back the videos we recorded, but we can use streaming technology to watch movies from the web, the phone offers YouTube and Reuters services for example.

Organizer functions, games

The calendar is perfect as usual. It has month and week views, we can store meetings, reminders, to-dos and anniversaries. It warns us if there are conflicts and we can set repetition. There is no problem with the alarm clock on Symbian phones, we can set a couple of time points. The alarm goes off even when the phone is turned off and we should know that this is a great positive thing, as most phones with an operating system (Windows Mobile, UIQ) doesn’t support this.

The calculator has only basic functions, but if someone is really passionate of the sinus function a much more complex calculator can be downloaded. Besides the pre-installed PDF reader and ZIP packer the handset also has the QuicOffice family installed which allows us to view our Microsoft Office documents. If we’d like to create a new one or edit one, N96 offers us to buy the full version of the software.

The games have a dedicated menu, it’s called N-Gage. The name of the not-so-successful handset has stayed, but it’s not a phone anymore, but a platform. The white-orange colors of the N-Gage menu are youthful and fresh, while the tapped interface is very pleasant. The startup screen always shows the most recent information about our status in the online competition, what have we been playing and what results we had. After this we get the list of installed games, the new ones available on the net and we can edit our profile.

The N96 I had for testing had five games on it. Asphalt 3D, World Series of Poker, Snakes Supersonic, Tetris and Mile High Pinball. I’ve tried the last two of these (Asphalt is an old piece, I know it already, poker is something I can’t play and Snake is on almost every Nokia phone). Tetris is just what it name says – well, I don’t know what I’ve been expecting. But I had great expectations of the pinball game, as I have grown up playing Pinball Dreams 2, but of course it was all in vain. There are a couple of good ideas, but it’s really hard to make the ball fall out, even on purpose.

Of course all of these are only demo versions. Fortunately we can still play quite a lot and there’s no time limit, but the “buy now” ad pops up just when the game starts to become a bit exciting and when you start to feel some success.

GPS, Ovi

Nokia Maps 2.0 is the navigation software and although we have seen the same thing on 6210 Navigator for example, let’s see the most important things in a nutshell: Navteq and TeleAtlas maps with a highly varying coverage in this region (although there are some surprises), 2D/3D modes (the latter being only a tilted map), map/satellite/hybrid views. On such a large screen this whole GPS thing would have a meaning, but.

But if we want to plan a route besides searching for an address and we want voice navigation then we have to pay extra, although 3 months of free navigation is included in the price of the phone. There is a map pre-installed on the phone so one can navigate for a time without internet connection, but once and a while we should let the software to use the net and plan routes with the most recent data. There are a million times better solutions for car navigation, but N96 is ideal for pedestrian use or for looking for POIs.

Ovi has a dedicated manual. All I knew about it until now is that it’s an online music store, which is true, but Nokia didn’t make a joke of it: everything is connected to Ovi. Nokia Maps, DVB-H, video sharing, music downloads and N-Gage are all Ovi services. So all multimedia-related features that cost extra: this is Ovi. One of the “extras” we get with Ovi is a code for Tetris, which – wow! – gives us a full version to download.

Data transfer, battery

Should I enlist them? GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, HSDPA, WLAN. Is there any other technology that can be used to access the Internet on our phone around these parts? Not really. So there is no problem with this part and Nokia’s browser serves this data communication arsenal perfectly. There isn’t really any need to set it up as it’s automatic, so we really just have to use it, use it, use it…

N96 can be connected with an RCA cable to a TV or a projector, just like its predecessor. I might not have to explain why is this good for (even more since the cable is included): it can be great for projecting presentations, showing images and videos (of course the QVGA resolution will stay a QVGA resolution), and I have to admit that I have even been playing games this way.

At local level we have a microUSB cable and Bluetooth for transferring data. The complex services (editing contact cards, uploading applications) are available if we install Nokia PC Suite on our PC from the provided CD.

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We again have the BL-5F battery under the hood, just like the one used in the first N95. It has a capacity of 950 mAh, but it should be enough, thanks to the weaker processor. Nokia felt this, as they promise 14 hours of music playback – in offline mode. If we’re connected to the network this time decreases dramatically, but of course they don’t mention this. Anyway: N96 can take it for two days, but let’s make it one and a half. And I didn’t even use it heavily: I’ve been talking for about 40 minutes in total, I had a couple of SMS messages and I used navigation for 5 minutes to search for some hidden little street. I don’t know, I don’t understand. If a manufacturer makes such a large cow with so many functions and such a large screen, then – if they have a 1200 mAh battery – why do they punish the user by forcing the battery of an average phone?

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Summary. I promised I will be cautious in the beginning, in order to avoid offending Nokia fans, but we still mention the flaws as facts. Of course it turned out differently again, if one writes down his or her experiences it will be a bit subjective, not keeping the facts back. Would I like an N96? Yes, I would like it. It’s a good phone, it knows a lot, maybe a bit too much for me. But it’s not a big enough hit. It doesn’t have anything we didn’t see before. There are a series of, hmm, “interesting” properties (much slower CPU, far from perfect camera, a bit uncomfortable keys, lame back cover, lame USB connection), so I’ve been expecting more, better, something more special.

N95 has been renewed. But the market will be the one to decide if it’s worth buying it. We think it’s not worth it yet, but if we really want such a high-level phone, that there’s Diamond, i900 or N95 8GB from the same manufacturer.

Bog

Translated by Szaszati

Nokia N96 has been provided by XXL GSM. The handset can be purchased at:
Budapest VI. Jókai tér 6.
Budapest VI. Teréz körút 18.
On-line at www.xxlgsm.hu.

Specifications

Nokia N96
	General
	Technology	GSM, UMTS, HSDPA
	Size	103 x 55 x 18 mm
	Weight	125 grams
	Available colors	black
	Display
	Display diagonal	2.8 inches
	Display resolution	240 x 320 pixels
	Display type	TFT
	Number of colors	16.7 million
	Memory
	Phonebook capacity	dynamic
	SMS memory / max. MMS size	dynamic / 300KB
	Internal memory	16 GB
	Memory expandability	microSD (max. 8GB)
	Data transfer
	Frequency bands	850/900/1800/1900 MHz
	GPRS / EDGE	Class 10 (4+1/3+2) / Class 10 (236.8 kbps)
	UMTS / HSDPA	present (384 kbps) / present (3.6 Mbps)
	IrDA / Bluetooth	none / 2.0 (A2DP too)
	WiFi	802.11 b/g
	USB	microUSB 2.0
	Push-to-talk / RSS	present / none
	GPS receiver	present
	Basic functions
	Profiles	present
	Vibra function	present
	Built-in handsfree	present
	Voice dialing / voice commands	present / present
	Sound recorder	present (max. 1 hour)
	Alarm clock	present, also when turned off
	Predictive text entry	T9
	Software
	Platform	Symbian 9.3 Series 60 Feature Pack 2
	WAP / HTML browser	present / present
	E-mail client	present (POP3, IMAP4, authenticated)
	Java	present, MIDP 2.0
	Games	N-Gage
	Currency converter	present
	Extra software	QuickOffice, Adobe PDF, Zip
	Multimedia
	Main camera	5 megapixels, autofocus
	Secondary camera	present, CIF resolution
	Video recording	present, VGA, 30fps
	Music player	present, can run in background
	Equalizer	present
	FM radio	present
	Battery
	Main battery	950 mAh Li-Ion
	Standby time	230 hours (GSM), 200 hours (3G)
	Talk time	230 minutes (GSM), 160 minutes (3G)
	Other
	TV-out, gyroscope