Nokia N95

The Nokia N95 (N95-1, internally known as RM-159) is a smartphone produced by Nokia. The N95’s functions include those of a camera phone and portable media player, in addition to offering e-mail, web browsing, local Wi-Fi connectivity and text messaging. It is part of the company’s Nseries line of smartphones. The N95 runs on Symbian OS v9.2, with an S60 3rd Edition platform with Feature Pack 1. The phone uses a two-way slider to access either media playback buttons or a numeric keypad.

Let’s start with the basics. 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.

GPS: The GPS is really GPS, not some assisted-GPS that Sprint and Verizon have in their phones. That means you can really navigate with it, like I did, to streets around SF I wasn’t too familiar with. (Specifically, the corner of Washington and Cherry, close to where the Zodiac killer blew away a Cabbie so many years ago.)

The support for high-speed networks in this new Nokia N95 mobile phone makes it easier to watch and record videos, take high-quality photos, listen to songs, surf the internet and check your email on the move with Nokia N95. The impressive 3D graphics, streaming video, built-in stereo speakers offering a 3D stereo effect and the large 2.6″ QVGA 16 million color display are other impressive features of this Nokia N95 latest handset.

Besides the quad-band GSM and GPRS networks, there’s also 3G and HSDPA, as well as 802.11b/g. There’s also a GPS receiver built in, but it’s here we ran into problems, as getting a reliable signal in London was nigh-on impossible. We managed a stable connection from a 15th- floor flat, but there are no guarantees, especially since Nokia has located the GPS antenna in the bottom of the handset, so it’s pointing at the ground. The software downloads maps as needed, so you could also face some huge charges if you use it abroad.