After a couple of days' use, I thought I might wanna share with those who are still thinking of getting this new phone from Nokia. However, I will also make some comparsion with my N93 phone to show the pros and cons of this phone. Anyway, I'm typing this review with this phone, killing travel time on the bus trips.
Design and Build
As what many reviewers had said, the build is very much better than its predecesser, particularly the slider. While the slider had improved, I still feel some looseness in the slider, especially when I slide upwards. The slide is tight when I slide to Media Player mode. With its black look, it adds a touch of classy look to it. As opposed to what others had commented on the net, the one I owned has a rubber-like coating on the back of the phone, giving me the extra grip on it to prevent slippage. However it does not have that real solid heavy feel as the N93 that tell of its justified high price tag.
The screen is large, about 1.5 times bigger than N93 screen, while the resolution remains the same. When I first use the phone, I felt the screen was kinda pixelated but after a brief use the screen will look just nice and the feel of pixelation will be gone. If you compare the N93 screen with N95 8Gb screen side by side, you will see that N93 screen is although smaller, but sharper.
The keys on the top casing (the part where the screen is) are although small, but not very uncomfortable to use. The tactile feeling is there and you won't feel that the keys are in real bad placements. The only gripe I have is that the pen key is too near to the D-pad and it pose a problem for people like me who likes to select text with such usage combination. I don't have large thumbs so I still can barely manage to use the combination with some compromise of ease. I don't have this issue with my old N93 back then.
Now let's talk about the number keypad. I must say that N93's keypad is really much better than N95 in terms of keypress feel and tactile feedback. Although N95 keypad is not that bad, it still lacks that comfortable feel where the buttons are big enough and the tactile feel is very springy. All in all the N95's keypad feel is still very good, although people with big thumbs might face some issues.
Battery
One of the major improvements made in the 2nd gen N95 is the use of a 1200mAH battery. This will address the issue raised by 1st gen users of battery drained up within a day of usage. I personally did about 30min of calls, 30sms, 1.5hrs of music playback thru bluetooth headset, 20mins writing part of this review and about 15mins of wifi surfing in a day and I still have 1/3 of battery juice left. Note that I enabled 3G Reception and Bluetooth plus set the screen brightness to max.
Software UI
There is some changes made to this phone's software as compared to N93's. While the outlook and functions remained pretty much the same, there's some small improvements made in the software.
Coming from N93 menu structure, icon placement in N95 had made some changes. Owners of 1st gen N95 and N76 should be already seeing this new arrangement, I don't know since I don't own them before so I won't be writing much on this. Overall, the UI navigation experience is not in the least reduced as compared to N93.
With the increase in Ram, the free memory is now increased from 20MB in 1st gen to 80+MB! This is really one major leap in memory improvement in my opinion. To date I have not experienced even a single software crash nor out of memory application shutdown. In addition, the response speed of software had improved, with no feel of lag at all.
The power saver is now set at landscape orientation which looked weird to me as I prefer it to be in portrait mode. Oh well, I made the some changes to beautify the screensaver thru installing a 3rd party application.
One good addition that I like from N95 is the system font size setting. As I am the kind of people who prefers to squeeze in as many words in one screen as possible, the ability to adjust the font smaller is good news to me.
Update: did I mention that in this phone you can now use 3GPP and MP4 video files as your ringtone? Use the freeware SUPER convertor and you will have video tones in no time!Multimedia
The multimedia key now leads you to a multimedia menu where video, photos, music and web links are categorised individually as Tiles. It will also show the latest played/added media on the top of the list. This is good, as I can scroll thru videos without going thru music and photos. The complaints are that I can't customize the menu as it does not have this feature (as far as I know, if anyone is able to, let me know :)). And the tiles do not display the whole list of selected media but only selected few, which could be from the latest ones. For those who still prefer the good'o Gallery, good news is that it is still there, but thru main menu.
Music player is the same as what would see in 1st gen N95. I paired the phone with my i-Tech R35 stereo bluetooth headset effortlessly and I'm ready to blast my Metal song collection without hassle. I can even control the music using my headset's playback controls. Sound quality as compared to HP HX4700, is almost on par. It has slightly less bass on the audio but adjusting via the equalizer will solve this. Overall, the audio quality is pretty decent. I was never a fan of audio effects as I always listen to songs without effects tweaking so I won't comment on the Loudness and Stereo Widening functions. Synchronising the phone with Windows Media Player is an easy task but current firmware seems to unable to transfer the album art to the phone. Hope Nokia can resolve it soon.
Video editor program had been removed from this model, so there is no way you can edit video on this phone any longer. Gee, I'll miss editing video on my N93 lol. Photo editor is still in this phone and is pretty much the same as what is preinstalled on other N-series models.
GPS
I have not really played much with this feature so I'll just give a brief review. Asia Maps had been removed from this phone, leaving only Nokia Maps in the menu. Guess Nokia is trying very hard to sell its new GPS software. I was given 2 months' free of navigation subscription and have to pay timed subscription in order to continue the navigation features. That's about $140SGD a year! So I installed a trial version of Mapking to test out the function. Locking on to position only takes less than 1 minute with assisted GPS feature, which they had been focusing in their marketing lately. Overall the navigation experience is pretty much enjoyable.
Camera
Camera specifications is pretty much the same as its 1st gen counterpart so I won't elaborate more. Camera is now activated by pressing and holding the capture button since the lens cover had been removed. The application starts up real fast and saves the photos after capture very fast as well. Picture is clear and crisp. For video functions, I had not play around but reckon it's the same as the 1st gen features, sans the video editing part.
Internet
Web surfing experience is a breeze. Defining your access point don't take too much time and you are ready to surf in less than 3 minutes. When I surf hugh web sites on my N93, the web application will hang and then exit showing the out-of-memory error. Not with this one. I can literally surf any sites without worrying about the site size, thanks to the RAM improvements. To date, the application hasn't crashed on me a single time.
That's about what I can review so far with these few days of usage (and also showed that how bored I am during my bus trip -_-)
