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.

Today we examine the imaging and video capabilities of the Nokia N96…

Even though it doesn’t have the insanely-bright Xenon flash that you get with an N82, the N96 still did a very respectable job in my informal 0 Lux test. Compare the image above to similar conditions for the N82 and N95 (both taken pre-cat).

Surprisingly though, for non-flash photography in ambient light the N96 washes out a lot of colour — at least using the default settings. Compare the rather unappetizing plate of Asian Legend fried dough balls with red bean paste on the left with the much more appealing dish to the right — the exact same plate shot with flash.

This is a bit of a head-scratcher, as even my lowly E71 is capable of reproducing more vivid colour in photos — of food at least. For more N96 pics have a look at my dedicated photo set on Flickr…

(My boy’s weekly grooming ritual…)

Switch to video mode and the camera delivers a very-nice VGA-quality file, ready for upload to YouTube (like the one above) or playback on your TV via the included RGB cable that plugs into the handset’s headphone jack.

I really wish Nokia’s Share online utility would support YouTube; in the meantime ShoZu is an excellent (and free) alternative. And there’s another reason you might prefer ShoZu: My installation of Share online has an annoying bug where everytime I try to upload a photo to Flickr I get a dupe of my Flickr account saved to my N96 for no apparent reason.

To sum up I can’t really recommend the N96’s camera over the those in the N82 and N95, unless you’re mostly shooting video and have an available DVB-H signal and/or iPlayer feed where you live.

Thanks to a bewildering bug (and a much-appreciated heads-up by fellow Nseries blogger Cj) it turns out that Nokia’s N-Gage app does indeed run on my N96. And so, with great anticipation I logged into my N-Gage account and headed straight to the downloads section for a title I had just missed last summer…

Of course, given that this particular N96 has no 3G service for North America, I had no other choice but to download over a glacially slow EDGE connection.

A few minutes in I got this message. Why exactly would I want to save a corrupted file?

Fortunately Nokia has given users the option of “sideloading” N-Gage content — that is, downloading files to a desktop computer and then transferring them to a handset via a local connection. And unfortunately I’m still waiting for an email from Nokia so I can download the file, install it and start playing the stupid game already!

Given Nokia’s track record with other notification services (cough cough — Ovi Sync — cough) let’s just say I’m not holding my breath on this one…

Today we set my Nokia N96 down on its porno kickstand and marvel at the video options for that huge 2.8-inch screen.

First up, the groundbreaking DVB-H live television tuner…

Oh, right… Just like Japan’s 1seg and South Korea’s DMB, Digital Video Broadcast isn’t available in Canada or the US and A. It has already launched in some Asian and European markets, though — hopefully when DVB finally makes its way here the carriers will see the value in keeping it a free service.

Yeah, probably not.

Next is a mobile version of BBC’s iPlayer…

Oops, almost forgot that the old media old guard thinks it can divide up the internet into different markets as has been done in the past. We have the same problem here, but that doesn’t make it any less infuriating…

Finally, something I can watch! The YouTube feed does a passable job of filling in for the sorely-missed emTube. You can’t save videos, though, only stream them.

And (big surprise) you can’t save those 20th Century Fox film trailers to your handset, either. But to give you an idea of the quality of these things you can check out this video of my first-ever S60 handset, courtesy of the directory’s official Nokia feed. Oh, and take note of the filetype and size while you’re at it, as the N96 will only play MPEG-4 video at 320 x 240 pixels.

So I’ve just received an N96 from Nokia’s WOM World. I’ll be reporting in more detail over the next week or two; in the meantime here are my first impressions of this flagship device…

The Good:

Two Finnish innovations make setting up an unlocked Nokia device easier than ever before:

1. While Nokia Canada’s handy Configurator Service no longer seems to work it’s also no longer necessary — a handy wizard for Operator Settings is now included, at least on the N96.
2. Firmware updates can now be downloaded and installed directly on the handset! Even better, the user’s installed apps and data are preserved through the process.

The Bad:

This one took me by surprise… It honestly feels like there’s some loose plastic film underneath the D-Pad of my handset. I’m not sure if it has anything to do with Nokia scrapping the navi-wheel functionality on this particular button or if it’s a production hiccup unique to my particular unit. Either way, if I paid the going price for a new N96 — about $1000 CAD last time I checked — I’d feel, well… I guess I’d feel like this.

The Ugly:

After two resets, a firmware update, another reset, a mass memory format and an erase & reinstall I am entirely unable to launch N-Gage on my N96. As far as know the two are compatible — see this mobile-ized N-Gage download page for proof — and there is also some evidence that other users are experiencing this problem. But if Nokia’s flagship multimedia device can’t run the company’s own in-house gaming platform it makes it pretty difficult for me not to give it a failing grade right out of the box.

Anybody out there have any ideas?

Ready, fight!

Nokia surprised its many fans around the world this week with the announcement that its N96 smartphone, the highly-anticipated successor to the flagship N95, would be available in India a month before its scheduled release in other markets. Of particular significance is that this announcement was made only three days before the release of Apple’s iPhone in that country.

Nobody’s denying that Nokia is trying to steal Apple’s thunder here, not even Nokia itself — they’ve got a 60% domestic market share to protect and see India as second only to China for future sales opportunities.

Both the N96 and the iPhone are likely to be considered luxury items in this part of the world — indeed, for about the price of three iPhones you could buy a brand-new car. In its favour Nokia was recently voted the country’s most trusted brand, while Apple has once again managed to get folks lining up to purchase their mobile device.

This battle for Indian smartphone supremacy won’t actually get started until Nokia gets some of their product on store shelves, but it will definitely be one to watch… Stay tuned!