The Wahyudiharto's Blog

At the end of August 2008, I decided to sold my 3 months old Nokia 5610 & bought a brand new Nokia N95 8GB. Basically, I still love the 5610 with all it’s simplicity but what I really need is a mini computer replacement, compact size & weight, equipp ed with wide coverage multimedia enhancement & also dedicated for power user functionality. As I don’t have to wake up my laptop on a hotspot zone just to checking out my AdSense account or remote those far away servers or simply killing time to playing games or just sit & relax reading my tons college paper tasks. Actually, there were other candidates beside N95 which is HTC TyTN II which comes with almost similar category class & price. The truth was; this TyTN was almost perfect for me (qwerty keyboard, Windows OS) but after all, I choosing the N-series with all pros & cons.

The N95 pros is; a huge 8GB internal storage (need additional cost to buy 1 GB external memory on TyTN), 16M color display (256K on TyTN), Carl-Zeiss 5Mpx lens with flash camera (3Mpx without flash on TyTN). While the cons in N95 is simply no qwerty keyboard, no touch screen & Symbian 9.2 installer (S60 3rd) has difficult to search over than Windows Mobile application. Anyway both devices are ready with 3G, WiFi, GPS & rotation screen (portrait or landscape mode). Pretty tight features, eh?

Display Features
N95 8GB has a bright & clear display showing 7 icons & 3 shortcuts referring to major applications on desktop screen, thus the menu structure inside is so simple to understand.



The 240x320x16M resolution is more than enough displaying on both portrait or landscape mode.

Office Applications
By default, this gadget has capability to read several office application types; text & word document, excel sheet, presentation file & PDF.


Note that the write function is disabled until you buy the license.

Digital Camera
The 5Mpx auto-focus Carl-Zeiss lens with flash is amazing even in a very dark room. The camera also work for hi-res video recorder. On screen, you’ll see a pro-like digital camera interface; the viewfinder & main camera features icons arranged on the right side of the display.


Too bad that N95 8GB has significant delay while switching on the camera. Also there is no dedicated button (or back shutter) to activate it automatically. Anyway, saving 5Mpx on storage is quite fast (internal memory effect?). Another camera lens are laid on the front panel.


The front 0.3Mpx camera is dedicated for video call feature. But, If you like to shot your own face, you can switch it from main camera.

Multimedia Gallery
Beside the camera button, there is one switch dedicated for gallery room. The gallery room has an intuitive interface with thumbnail animation displaying captured images & videos.


From this menu, you may open images or video & show them as animated slide running or just open it & edit object using simple native image/video processing application.

Media Player
N95 8GB has standard media player software support to play common multimedia files such as sound (MP3, wav, midi) & video (3gp, mp4 & rm).


Well, it’s a basic Nokia native compatibility with multimedia files. Anyway, you need to install from 3rd party software to extending it’s capability (eg: playing divx or mpg video type).

N95: PlayStation Portable a la Nokia
This Nokia series has been dedicated to support N-Gage games software. With screen rotation capability, N95 become a great mobile PSP.


Unfortunately, 4 multimedia keys on top side doesn’t have any purpose when game mode activated in landscape screen, so practically the only key you have to use for playing game is the navigation buttons.

Digital Compass
The enabled GPS built in on N95 is presented for traveler, at least it useful for me who just living in Jakarta for 3 years. Anyway the GPS activation take about 1 minute with some conditions; must use on open area straight vertically with the clear (no cloud) sky or no any barrier above your head & take 45’ phone position with slider keypad opened.


The great is, the location where you stand are found on the map accurately even it took some times to display it. If the connection is established, the blue dot in the map screen will follow where ever you move on.

WiFi Experiences
This is my first time to have wireless connection test with non computer device or PDA & overall result is more than I expected before. The connection mechanism quite simple from the auto search process until it can browse an online page & it completely different compared with PDA or laptop.


Surfing website on N95 display is more than enough, especially when the screen rotated in landscape mode but you may have difficult to entering text in this mode.


For power user necessities, you can install various network based application such as PuTTY, FTP client, Google Mail kit, VNC viewer software or simply chat application (Yahoo Go or Morange V).

TV Out Function
N95 8GB equipped with standard 3.5” jack purposed to output sound into stereo headset or external active speaker. With this jack too, Nokia provide an RCA cable to displaying out the screen to TV set or projector device.


This set will enabled you to perform mobile presentation show or simply watching video recorded from the phone on TV.

Resume
For power user purposed, this N95 8GB just awesome & perfect, at least for me – a slider keypad mobile phone lover. Even that it is not a fresh product from Nokia, you must exchange it with a very high price.

Labels: N95 8GB, Nokia, Review

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