Awesome, complete, in depth review. Check it out.
Some snippets:
Sliding the cover back to its standard position automatically locks the keypad (it also locks after configured time out). The movement is very smooth and additionally supported by a spring, which means: push it slightly and it’ll go further by itself. So far so good. What’s missing, however, is any kind of lock keeping the cover in its central position. Unfortunately, it happens that it slides up or down in pocket, which also automatically unlocks the keypad… It’s also just a bit too loose and tends to rattle a little (although it may be just my unit).
Considering the pre-sales firmware version it’s too early to comment on the power efficiency of the retail units, but the tested device worked full day with quite extensive use and about two days with light use. The N95 doesn’t support USB charging.
The N95 features a built-in GPS receiver. It’s the same chip you can find in the Nokia E90. It’s quite sensitive and after obtaining fix it keeps working indoors and under heavy foliage, but it’s slightly less sensitive and also slightly less accurate than SiRF Star III based receivers.
The only problem, present in recent S60 camera phones, and also strongly affecting the N95 is incorrect automatic white balance resulting in excessive magenta saturation giving pictures unnatural, purple hue. Hopefully this will be fixed via a firmware update.
Nokia N95 is not only a great still camera but also a fantastic video recorder. Like other high-end models, it records MPEG-4 video with VGA (640×480) resolution at 30 frames per second. "DVD quality" is certainly an exaggeration but it definitely offers quality of amateur single-sensor Mini-DV camcorders. The tested unit, however, was still running an early, unoptimized firmware, and the recorded video wasn’t smooth, with some occasional jerks and delays. But this will undoubtedly be removed in retail firmware. Video stabilisation helps avoiding shakes and vibrations.
Being based on the S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1, the N95 contains the new 2.0 version of the Nokia OSS web browser. It’s now faster and less memory hungry. Even the first version was very good at rendering web pages the same way as you can see them on your desktop PC, but v2 goes even further and provides almost perfect accuracy. Moreover, it now supports both WWW and WAP, so it is now the only browser preinstalled in the phone. New features in the 2.0 version also include auto-completion for form data fields, video plug-in, support for favicons, Flash Lite 2.0, RSS and Atom feeds with automatic update, password manager, support for landscape orientation, toolbar, background sounds, saving images and whole pages for offline browsing, operator cache, visual windows manager and user agent profile. Wow, it’s now a fully mature browser. The only thing I miss is Opera-like small screen rendering mode.
The perfect phone? We will have to wait and see until final firmware is out.
The image quality isn’t acceptable. It can be fixed via post processing … but who wants to do that?