I picked up a Nokia N95 mobile phone
yesterday after waiting in vain for a Nokia N76 for a while. It was a
good decision to buy the N95 which has very appealing features.
After toying with the phone for some
time which resulted in a couple of reboots – know not if the
reboots where due to actions of mine or due to bugs. Anyway after
updating the phone with the latest firmware from the support section
of Nokia, this problem was not encountered any more.
The phone finds Wi-Fi access points in
range and browsing the Internet using Wi-Fi connected to broadband
Internet is a delight.
Looking to play video from youtube,
while connected to the Internet through Wi-Fi was disappointing. From
a message that appeared while trying to play video, I figured the
browser does not have Macromedia Flash plugin, though there is an
independent flash player available on the phone. But
google.com/m/products has a link to youtube which has a portion of
the youtube content. I could not find my favorite videos here. But
the video files I played from this site were of good quality and
streamed without breaks.
Making movies with the phone is
thrilling. The picture quality is very good. You can connect the
phone to a TV and what is seen on the phone’s screen appears on TV
also. The picture quality on the TV is of course not comparable to
the quality you get on the phone’s screen.
Setting GPRS/MMS/WAP from cellone was
easy. All that was needed to be done was give in the relevant details
on the cellone site and save the set of SMS messages that arrived
with the configurations. Once the messages were save, the Internet
could be accessed.
Morning walks with music from the phone
is convenient. The music controls on the headphone connector that you
pin on to your shirt lets you stop, start, move to next or previous
audio files in the play list you have selected. There are also volume
controls on this equipment. So you do not have to take the phone out
of the pocket to answer a call or adjust your music.
The pouch that comes with the phone is
well designed. You can plug in your phone charger, ear phones, USB
cable or operate the buttons on the side of the phone without taking
the phone out of the pouch. To look at the screen or dial the phone
all you need to do is flip the lid.
Nokia map loader was installed on the
PC to check out GPS. But there where no maps available for India
while running this program. So I gave up checking GPS.
I have had only a day with the phone.
So there are things I need to look at like the phone’s modem
connectivity to a laptop, check out if the camera on the front panel
could be used for video conferencing over Wi-Fi. I don’t think I will
get to use the bar code scanner.
All that I have been doing with this
phone since this morning like movie making, browsing with Wi-Fi,
watching video, checking out TV connectivity, listening to audio for
an hour and making and receiving a few calls has been taxing on the
battery which needed a recharge by mid afternoon. But this is not
going to be a daily usage pattern and the battery should last at
least for a full day when I fall into the normal usage mode.
I love this phone!
AN UPDATE
Someone with a Nokia E90 showed me how
to set GPS – your phone scans for satellites, gives the position’s
longitude and latitude. You also get your distance from the start
position to a destination, your speed, average speed, distance and
time. So tomorrow when I take that morning walk with the N95, this
should be something interesting to try out.
Something I noticed was that when you
select your destination from the saved list & reach that
destination the system shows you have arrived. Unlike I mentioned
earlier in this review, you do not need maps to have the GPS working.