Equipped with an amazing 5 megapixel camera, music player, large QVGA display, built in speakers, support for HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access), integrated GPS plus 8GB of internal memory. The Nokia N95 8GB truly is a remarkable device. And it's only slightly heavier than it's counterpart the N95 and also has a larger display.
The Nokia N95 is a 3G smartphone built on the Series 60 Symbian interface (version 3.1). Let's be clear from the start that these types of phone are slow, have a tendency to freeze or shut down, and have unstable firmware. They are also large and heavy. At 120g the N95 is of average weight for a smartphone, but is pretty bulky, despite its slide design. At least you won't forget which pocket it's in! When closed, you can access menu functions using the 5-way navigation key and the associated control keys. The N95 also has several other dedicated media keys that can be used as shortcuts to media functions. This is a good feature if you like to have lots of buttons to push, but sometimes they just end up getting in the way. When you slide the phone open you have access to a full keypad, but like the Nokia N73, the buttons are too small to be really comfortable. The user interface will be familiar to anyone who has used a Series 60 phone before: it's not as simple to use as the Nokias of olden days, but you wouldn't expect such a high powered device to be, would you? So, without getting into the functionality of the phone yet, we'd give it 2 stars for usability.
The Camera boasts a plethora of features including auto focus, red-eye reduction, flash, self timer, Carl Zeiss Optics and there's also a 20x zoom plus resolution of 2592 x 1944. Supported image formats are JPEG and Exif. At this number of pixels, you can (theoretically) match anything that a dedicated digital camera is capable of - provided that you have the optics to back up the megapixel grunt. Nokia have been developing their camera capabilities quite impressively recently using Carl-Zeiss optics and Tessar lenses - the Nokia N93 being the best camera phone before the release of the N95. The N95 lacks the optical zoom of the N93, but retains the autofocus, flash and lens.
Take superb quality photos and video clips with your Nokia N95 8GB, share them with your friends and family or for the big screen experience why not show them on a compatible TV with the TV output feature.
The other most interesting feature of the N95 is the built-in GPS navigation system. The N95 actually has a GPS system built into the phone, that communicates directly with the satellite. This enables you to use the phone to track your position either on foot or in-car. You'll need to buy a license to use the Nokia mapping system though. Now, whilst this is a nice feature to have in a phone, we've got to say that it doesn't match the quality of a dedicated satnav system like the TomTom One. The sensitivity and reliability of the GPS receiver is not as good, and neither is the user-friendliness of the system.
If you're after music on the go then you wont be disappointed with the Nokia N95 8GB. It supports a host of audio formats: AAC, AAC+, eAAC, eAAC+, MP3, MP4, M4A, WMA, AMR (NB-AMR), MIDI Tones (poly 64), RealAudio 7,8,10, SP-MIDI, True tones (WB-AMR), plus audio streaming and has an audio recorder.
These are the most groundbreaking features, but the N95 has almost everything else you could think of including in a phone too: a music player with support for all common music formats, a stereo FM radio, integrated handsfree speaker, speaker independent voice dialling, talking ringtones, HSDPA (the fast data transfer technology dubbed "3.5G") and lots more! When it comes to connectivity, the N95 is the best-connected device in town, with support for Bluetooth 2.0, USB 2.0, Infrared, Wireless LAN, TV-Out and a 3.5 mm headphone jack. Its memory is also more than adequate with up to 160 Mbytes of onboard memory and support for microSD memory cards (up to 8 Gbytes). Battery life is OK - when you consider how much work has to be done to power this beast, you can't really set your expectations too high.
In a nutshell: The most technically advanced smartphone ever! Complete with GPS satellite navigation, a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus, 3G video calling, and every other gadget you can think of! On the downside it's large, and like most smartphones does not have 100% robust firmware. If you've used another Nseries phone or Symbian phone before, then you'll love it! Available in 4GB and 8GB versions; in silver and black.
You'll never get lost again once you own a Nokia N95 8GB thanks to the integrated GPS and map application!
