Having been with 3 for 16 months I was allowed to get an upgrade. This is the first time such a carrot has been dangled in front of me, having been a pay-as-you-go customer of One2One/T-Mobile and Virgin Mobile previously, so I was intrigued to find out what my continuing loyalty was worth.
It was worth a Nokia N95, which I'd heard was a sweet piece of phone pie. Not only did it have a really rather good 5 Megapixel camera and GPS, it also had wifi connectivity. When I saw the quality of its video recording, I was sold.
I've been playing with it for almost a week, pretty much constantly to the annoyance of my family. Here's what I like, and what I think sucks.
LIKE: Wifi. Much of my phone browsing takes place around the house, especially when sitting with Jack as he falls asleep. Going from a paid-for 3G data connection to a free(ish) wifi connection is fab.
LIKE: Browser. The web browser itself is great, supporting Flash and Javascript, and does a great job of rendering 'proper' web pages as well as sites optimised for mobile devices.
LIKE: GPS. It's cool! I know where I am!
LIKE: Media player. I love having the 60Gb on my iPod but I could go away for a few days with just the phone. Its media player is the best I've seen on a phone (admittedly, I've not handled an iPhone) and its built-in speakers are really good quality. If video is more important, it comes with Real Player which supports a load of codecs.
LIKE: TV-out. Yeah, really. You can plug this phone into a TV to look at photos, watch videos, or just use the phone as a whole. This was quite a surprise!
LIKE: Expandability. The basic N95 (not the N95-8GB) has a Micro SDHC which has been tested to accept cards up to 16Gb. That's bananas! 8Gb cards are much easier to obtain (and cheaper) so I've got one en route.
LIKE: Software expandability. There's loads of software available for it, both by Nokia and third parties.
LIKE: Nokia Lifeblog. A nifty combination of on-phone and on-PC software, presenting a timeline of all sorts of everything that the phone has experienced, so that you can blog what you like easily - either from the PC or the phone itself. Nice.
LIKE: The kit in the box. Besides the phone, there's the mains charger, a car charger, a remote control/microphone thing, headphones that plug into that (standard 3.5mm plugs - yay), a USB cable and the TV-out cable (standard camcorder lead). Then there's the DVD of software, and some rather thorough manuals. Makes a change.
HATE: Stiff keypad. At least at the moment - it might loosen - this phone needs a lot more pressure on the keypad than any phone I've had before.
HATE: Keypad layout. This is purely down to coming from five years of Sony Ericsson phones. The shift and space functions on the keypad are on different keys to what I've grown accustomed to. I also think the way that a list of possible words appears on SE phones is much better than stabbing away at a button to change the predicted word without any sign of what comes next.
HATE: Copy and paste... or lack thereof. At least I've not found it yet.
HATE: Re-entering the wireless network key. It seems some applications bypass the cached details and force you to tap in the network key again. And again. And again.
HATE: Nokia Maps subscription model. Nokia want you to subscribe to some key software's key functionality. Bastards.
MASSIVE HATE: No charging over USB. That's heinous in this day and age.
With all this in mind, would I still choose this phone? Absolutely. Even the most annoying oversight doesn't detract from the positives. I reckon with a bit of research I'll be able to find software to paper over some of these cracks, and £3 has got me a combined USB data/charger cable from Hong Kong on eBay.
More reports as I get used to the phone...
1 comments:
* stiff keypad - it gets a little better, but not much.
* layout - I've had nokias for years and still find it a little awkward sometimes. There are just too many buttons.
* copy and paste - type some text, hold down "pencil" and move the cursor keys to highlight the text then select copy whilst still holding pencil. Yes, this requires two hands. Hold down pencil again somewhere else to get "paste" option.
* network key - yes, bad apps. very annoying! although I think most of the native ones should remember it.
* nokia maps - I use Google Maps instead. Not as functional I think, but works for me. http://m.google.com/
* no usb charging. SUCKS. good luck on the charger, i've still been too lazy to buy one.
I don't know if you've noticed but if you play podcasts back via the podcast tool you can't stop and resume from the same place later (at least in my firware, v20) but you can in the music player. Also, leaving a track on pause for hours totally destroys the battery, so better to close the player rather than just pause and switch to another app.
Also, I use the "post to web" for uploading to Flickr all the damn time. It certainly sets the bar high for other phones (the iphone really does have a much better music player though!)
Look forward to your comments on battery life ;)
Post a Comment