Nothings completely perfect, and there’s not enough information out there on the failings of most products, and this is no exception. It still has no sway on my decision that at present it is the coolest phone that reasonable money can buy.
As anyone knows from my previous posts on the Nokia N95 8GB, I have an awesome amount of respect for this phone and its older brother the Vanilla N95. It’s the perfect travel companion in regards to email, light web browsing, GPS/Mapping and a nifty little media player, in the case that a small laptop (or a pretty much immobile 17″ one for that matter) is too cumbersome to carry around.
Gman – Dark Side
But I musn’t go on, I’ve repeated myself enough already. So on to the point of this post, you see, it has a dark side. A few of them actually, Possibly not as major as the iPhone missing 3G support (until late July, anyway), or the NASA rocket, which was programmed for calculations in Miles, but data entered in metrics, but it has a down point.
I’ve found that no-one really talks about the N95′s points, the review sites are too concerned with the quality of the camera, or that it has thirty one and a quarter more features than the equivalent Sony Ericcson, Samsung or LG device. And often if you search for what I would consider issues, you’ll find a small forum thread with two or three people discussing the problem, its just not heavily publicised. So here’s my attempt to keep it real, level the playing field if you will.
The Major – Data Transfer Speed
The transfer speed to/from the N95 is nothing short of horrendous. In this day and age of flash and other storage devices which can read up to (and in excess of), 50-100MB/s, the data transfer to the fixed flash card is a pitiful 500-600KB/s. This wasn’t an issue when phones had 256 or 512MB free memory, as filling the device would still only take a few minutes. Filling the full 8GB card takes the better part of three and a bit hours!
A faster data transfer medium
My 4GB iPod Nano has a file transfer speed of approximately 10-15MB/s a second, and I can fill its memory just under 10 minutes (not including the time it takes afterwards to level sound output and “determine gapless playback information”). If Apple can get it right on a 2 year old, cheap as chips, consumer device, then why can’t Nokia achieve better than USB1 speeds on their “flagship” device? I’ve been assured it is USB2, just not High speed (HS) ~480mbps. Instead, we’re stuck with Full Speed (FS) which is marginally faster than the USB1 spec of 12mbps, Pitiful!
This probably wouldn’t bother most people as there might not be much of a need to be removing and replacing the data on the memory card often, but when you’re uploading movies, music and videos on a nightly basis this becomes a real pain. This is the one thing I can see that might make the original N95 a better choice, as it has a removable memory card, so you can put it any old card reader in the hope that it may read/write faster.
Other
The rest of the bad points come as a direct result of comparing the N95 to the Apple iPhone. That’s usability, and design, and interestingly enough battery life. It really is just too complicated, sometimes just the easiest tasks can require 10-15 key presses. Considering the keypad (not including the numeric keypad) consists of over 20 keys, you’d think there would be easy, fuid ways to accompolish simple tasks.
Nokia have included a lot of features in the phone that promote its use out in the open, such as using the web browser on a train, or walking/travelling with the GPS Maps app/Sports Tracker open. In any form of glare or sunlight, this is a difficult task, often to the point where it gets too difficult and I’ll just give up.
Battery life has improved a lot since i did the latest firmware upgrade (I assume a permanently running process has been removed?!), but I still find on days of moderate to heavy use the phone can be dead before I get home to charge it!
A worthy competitor??
Considering the iPhone has a larger, more vibrant screen, and it still boasts almost double usable battery life and media playback/talk time, this is definitely something that might need a look in, in later models.
But as I said, nothings perfect, and trawling around the web shows that pretty much any product has its ups and downs, and the techy in me loves (almost) everything about this phone. So no, I still wouldn’t trade it in for an iPhone, HTC (Windows Mobile) phone, Blackberry, or Cheeseburger phone despite their positives. I just can’t help but think that it may have been a bad business decision letting these fundamental features slip, when they’re elsewhere in the market for a much cheaper price.
