With Nokia’s N96 now making its way back to WOM World I’ll share with you my final thoughts on their current flagship multimedia device…
It may not seem like a big deal that a $1,000 CAD N96 wrecks a $1 cell phone charm — see this full-res pic for details — until you consider that a wrist strap or lanyard would get the same treatment, thereby compromising the security of your investment should it fall out of hand.
Previous readers will know that I much prefer QWERTY to T9 when it comes to text entry, and the N96’s numeric keypad certainly isn’t going to win me over.
It looks classy and all, but with flat, stiff keys and short travel entering anything but a phone number is a frustrating experience.
Compare that with this, the keypad you’ll find on Nokia’s aging N95.
With contoured keys that have a nice, spongy feel, the N95 is still the best keypad in the Nseries line — at least until the N97 comes out later this year.
Oh, and the N95’s D-Pad doesn’t emit any horrid, plastic-y sound, either…
In fact, N95 owners have little if any reason to upgrade to the N96. In exchange for a bigger screen and the (so-far) empty promise of mobile video they would be giving up a better keypad, an N-Gage install that actually works, a potentially better camera and a mature product that has benefitted from almost two years of firmware upgrades.
I’d hesitate to call the N96 a dud, but as a fan of Nokia’s products I’m relieved that better handsets — like the N97 and N85 — have potentially eclipsed it.
2 Comments
AC:
Based on your review, my LG Chocolate isn’t that out-of-date. My LG is a slider, too, with the T9 keypad and the directional controls on the bottom of the screen. The N96 still trumps the LG in terms of what’s under the hood, of course.
I’m wary of the slide form factor now that my nearly 2-year-old LG is feeling a bit loose on the rails, so to speak. I realize that flip phones probably have the same issue after enough flips, but given I’ve only dropped the LG once and always keep it securely encased in leather case, the looseness of the slide is a concern. How have you found Nokia’s slides and/or hinges to work as they age?
Ed
Actually that’s one thing I neglected to mention — the slide mechanism on the N96 seems very sturdy, especially when compared to the N95 I got to trial last summer.
An advantage of the dual-slider design on both of these devices is that the screen automatically rotates to landscape mode when put into the “media player position”, i.e. when the number pad is hidden…
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