This highly anticipated successor to the Nokia N95 is packed with features but is it what we’ve been waiting for? Some of the improvements look great on paper but we were keen to get our hands on it to see if it delivered a better experience than the N95.
What we like
If you like the N95 then you’ll like the N96 because it’s practically the same phone. There’s HSDPA (3.5G), Wi-Fi, GPS and a 5-megapixel camera that takes as good pictures as the N95’s. Unlike the N95, there’s a whopping 16GB of internal memory and you can expand that up to 32GB via the microSD slot.
The N96’s screen is great for viewing YouTube videos on and there’s an iPlayer client for it so you can catch up with all the latest BBC content. In a very clever move, Nokia added a small stand at the back so that you can rest the N96 on a table and hold it up when you’re watching a video. Another noteworthy feature is that Nokia placed a standard 3.5mm headphone jack at the top.
What we don’t like
We waited patiently for the N96 and although it offers a lot we don’t think it delivers a much superior experience to its predecessor. Yes, there’s more memory, a better placed headphone jack and a clever stand but that’s not the huge leap we expected. The worst thing about the N96 though, is that it feels less well made than the N95, it feels flimsy and the keypad isn’t as good in our opinion.
Conclusion
If you own an N95 then we wouldn’t bother getting an N96 as there’s not much more to see here. If you don’t own an N95 and like the sound of the N96 then we still wouldn’t advise you to buy it as Nokia is bound to come up with something much better in the near future. We’re just not sure why Nokia bothered to call it the N96 when it really isn’t that much of an improvement.
Specification
| OS | Symbian |
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