What is your Nokia N95 experience after a year?
Quietly and without fanfare the N95 has now been around for about a year in most countries. Time to think back and remember last year and ask yourself:
And be completely honest with yourself. Feel free to answer anything as silly as: I wanted the geekiest smartphone on the market. Or I just bought the most expensive one. Or it was monday. Be honest to yourself. Because now you can answer the following question in earnest:
Did it promise every thing I wanted and did it do everything it promised? Never mind those grumpy other people, where you content? With your phone? In the last year we have seen, slider problems, at least 4 firmware updates for the N95 to fix some minor and some glaring bugs. Compared my old mobile phones never needed firmware updates. They worked. Simple.
However the last year we not only got bug fixes, we got added features with the firmware, complimentary software from Nokia. Upgrades. Things like:
- correcting purplish pictures
- fixed hidden network problems (finally)
- added demand paging to solve the limited memory
- increased phone speed and battery usage
- A-GPS support
- an improved Nokia Maps 2.0 beta
- added geo-tagging
- Share Online for blogging
- Internet radio
- flash-in--web page support.
- N-Gage
and so on... A rather new approach for a company, particular Nokia. Nokia's N-series phones seem to get firmware upgrades and software enhancements as much as a Linux OS gets in a year. Better yet, Nokia Beta labs seems to want to track and field test the latest developments for mobile phones. Now a year later I wonder:
.
Is it? Al major bugs solved, all promises fulfilled albeit a bit late? Or is there one missing?
And NO, requests for touchscreen are NOT allowed ;-)
Here are my answers:
- I wanted: 3G, wifi, e-mail, web browsing, GPS with satnav, quality 3+ MPixel photo camera and occasional decent 640x480 video recording. The specs promised all, but did they deliver?
- I got last year: Every I wanted and more like SIP, A2DP, uPnP support and reading office documents attached to e-mail. But I also got purplish images, slow GPS-locking and a rather unstable and simple satnav and slider problems. And of course system crashes due to limited memory. Connecting to hidden wifi networks gave serious troubles.
- I got now: All I wanted then with an much improved Nokia Maps beta, and things like SIP, A2DP, uPnP support and reading office documents attached to e-mail. Speed, stability and battery usage are now acceptable. In fact I currently use almost all the applications of the phone. And yes, hidden wifi networks work fine now.
- My one wish: Decent S/MIME support for e-mails. I want it even more than Skype.
And yes, my next phone should be Symbian Touch, have a magnetic compass for pedestrian navigation, 3x optical zoom, better jpeg-quality, Xenon-flash, be twice as fast, twice as more power effcient and be exactly the same size! Support virtual dolby surround and a builtin bluetooth headset! And oh yes, it should be able to be used in the pouring rain! Although I draw the line at these Burlandish antics.
Is it still worth the bucks? Feel free to answer my questions in the comments below ;-)
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Comments
The image jerks are very likely related to problems with the conversion time of some video frames becoming too high. In other words, sometimes it takes the hard+software more than 1/30th of a second to compress a single frame in the incoming video stream. The maximum frame conversion time is most likely not inverse linear with the selected compression rate. However resolution changes (at least for software implementations) would yield more or less linear lower frame conversion times (pixel count vs conversion time).
I guess a test is required to find out if the normal-quality at 640x480 is less jerky than high quality at 640x480. But I am sure the 320x240 suffers less of jerkiness. Some pun intended here ;-) Feel free to pick up the idea.
In any case the normal video mode would perhaps be more useful for shaky video recordings a la 'Cloverfield'. But for some reason, I have the camera alway set to high quality. Even if a lower resolution or quality might give better results. Mmmmm, I think I need to reevaluate my N95 video recording strategies.
What reasons did I have to buy this phone?
I'm obsessed with finding a perfect convergent, mobile device. The N95 was the first mobile device to have all things wrapped up into one, small package. And, I feel, it still is. I wanted a smart phone, portable PC, MP3 player, GPS navigator, video camcorder, digital camera, and mobile game consel. What other device does all this?!?
Was that phone a year ago what I wanted?
I liked it then but I was frustrated with certain performace capibilities. GPS seemed to not work very well and I constaintly got an "Out of memory" message when attempting to run several programs at once. However, I was impressed about all the basic caiblities.
Is the phone now what you wanted then?
Thanks to the firmware updates, my major issues have all been addressed! Assisted GPS works MUCH better and thanks to the new RAM management, I almost never get an out of memory message. A year later I still feel like this is the best phone on the market (for my needs).
My Over-all review of my N95-1
The N95: Jack of all trades, master of none! Still, a year later, the best mobile device on the market (for me). So far, I still see the N95 as the worlds best convergent device. Period.