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.

But you might say it’s just a phone, its not a PDA, and it doesn’t look quite as funky as the iPhone, but it really, just, works! No, its not just a phone, its:

• connected, through constant high speed access to the internet via wireless/3G network;
• for web browsing, email, RSS, social networking; and
• constant voip/skype connectivity for next to free international phone calls
• got an inbuilt GPS with Google/Garmin/Tomtom maps support
• a fantastic camera/video camera for day to day use, which stands up against most of the cheaper consumer modelled digital cameras
• a worthy media player for playing both 3gp/mpeg4′s and divx/mp3 and pretty much anythign else you can throw at it.
• also, all those other things you’d expect from a similar unit. A phone, calendar, address book.

As you can see, for the time being, I like this machine a little bit too much, and I hope things stay that way. Last night I was sitting on the Reading express train, frantic as I’d forgotten to pick up a paper or two at Waterloo station I was worried about how I would fill the next 20 minutes of my life. By the time I’d reached home, I’d updated my Facebook profile, uploaded a few photos taken earlier in the day, read most of the news articles I’d missed in the free tabloids, and watched the better part of the new American Dad episode.

I thought I’d end this by writing a quick list of the best applications I’ve found to date to make the N95 experience even better. Behold, in no particular order:

• 
• truphone – A VOIP/telephone app
• This app literally blew me away. As long as I’ve got internet connectivity (either through a Wireless LAN, or my phone providers 3G network), I can make and recieve phone calls to pretty much any where in the world (yes, Australian mobiles too) for free. I’ve long been used to calling friends and family via Vonage or Skype at home due to the sometimes prohibitive cost of calling an Australian mobile via land line, this is all that, and more from a device you carry on you at all times.

• Mobile Gmaps & Google Maps Mobile
• Just like Google Maps, or Google Earth, with the added benefit of GPS tracking through the phoones GPS. MGMaps is (I believe) a joint project between Microsoft, Yahoo and Google to provide extensive maps/satellite images to the mobile platform, so its definitely the better of the two.

• 
• Opera Mobile Browser
• Yes, the same web browser, which I used for a quite a while before the eventual migration to Firefox permanance (word?!), it definitely seems to out perform the standard web browser speed wise, though its not quite as streamlined, look and feel wise.

• 
• Gmail Mobile
• In all fairness I should probably group google maps altogether, as they’re always fantastic. But this a functioning, fast client for the Gmail mail service

And really, the list could go on forever. But a few more things to check out are:

• TaskSpy – A task/process list with memory/CPU information and the ability to kill processes
• YBrowser – A file browser, text viewer, unzipper to access all areas of the phones storage
• Accelerometer plugin – Plugin to access the phones inbuilt accelerometer (read: Wiimote ninja style)
• rotateMe - An app for auto changing between landscape and portrait depending on the angle the phone is held at (requires Accelerometer)
• FlipSilent - Flip the phone to silence an incoming call, flip it back again to turn volume on again (requires Accelerometer)
• ActivityMonitor - A Pedometer to record steps and exercise activity for the health buff (requires Accelerometer)
• SportsTracker - Same as above with GPS support for distance/mapping calculations
• RSSWorld – An RSS Feed Grabber
• putty – The same SSH Client
• Windows Live Messenger - Enough said

I got my new phone the other day, its a Nokia N95, the new one, that comes in black, because everyone knows, “Once you go black, you never go back”… Or so a lewd popup that came up when I searched for that picture would have me believe.

It’s not exactly new news, as the original version (the silver one) has been out on the market for at least a couple of years now. But there’s been some good fixes added to the new one that made the wait worth it (I’ve been waiting since about September last year). These are mainly related to the battery life, which apparently lasted less than a day of normal use, mines good for 24-36 hours of fairly heavy use so far.

Anythings an upgrade from the entry level £20 Prepaid mobile I’ve had since I arrived in the Ukey, but there are some big plus’s that make it worthwhile. Probably the main one of these is the camera in the phone, a 5MP beast which performs quite well, especially when compared to any camera phone I’ve seen before it. These photos were taken with the phone:

No complaints there! This is great as previously I’ve almost always gone out with a camera, phone and whatever else is required for that particular outing, now all I need (for most occasions) is the phone.