Thursday September 14, 2006

Media phone lust.

Nokia n95

I have had the joy - or pain? - of playing with a Nokia n95 for the last several days. The first phase of the playing was a review of the UE, then I just played with it. Took it home and used it. I love media phones and am a big moblogger of photos and such so this phone is one I have been waiting to evaluate for a while.

The case that comes with the beast is a complete "Kodak Brownie" camera retro design. Its gorgeous - all the details are wonderful. The little metal button to close it; the wavy pattern on the inside. The brown is dead on. I checked it against my Brownie camera at home. The n95 case does have hard plastic sides which stiffen the case to better protect the phone.

Alas, the case is not perfect. The hard plastic is a tad too thick to really use the phone as a camara. Its hard to press the buttons. But the real kicker was the unlock issue. I locked the phone, put it in its case, and tossed it into my purse with everything else. Just like I do with any cell phone.

The phone unlocked itself and called my husband 15 times. Needless to say my husband was annoyed. I tried putting the phone in the little pocket for cell phones in my purse. Same thing. The beautiful stiff brown case is perfectly designed to rock back and forth on the buttons and unlock them. Grrrr!

So, I took the case off. I put the phone in the purse that way. It still unlocked but not as frequently and it only called my husband twice. Better.

I put the phone in the pocket of my jeans. The phone slides in two directions. Nice smooth slides. One way to open the keypad, the other to open the music control buttons. Everytime you move the phone, it slides open. And unlocks. I checked the beast out and tried to figure out if it had a physical lock so it can't slide. Doesn't appear to have anything. Grrrr!

The beast does take great pictures. This one is from the Fitzgerald Marine Preserve tide pools. This one is scaled; the full resolution version is here.

It takes great movies too. None of the tests I did were youtube-able however. You will just have to imagine videos of a dancing 5 year old maniac.

The phone has the latest and greatest Series 60 user interface. I can read my work email, enter appts, SMS/MMS to my hearts content, the contacts application is fully featured. You have to have a memory card to USB it up to a mac to download big files. Bluetooth works great but slow for movies.

Make sure you buy one for your country if you want to plug into a TV. The one I had is a PAL version and I did plug it into a TV and you could tell it just worked - complete with rolling image on my NTSC TV.

The battery life is about what you might expect. Charge it everyday if you plan on playing with all those cool features. I did not play with the GPS as my SIM card from Cingular would not cooperate. But taking pictures and then downloading them all day meant the battery was not going to last more than one day, maybe a day and a half, on one charge.

I love the feature set on this phone but I am really going to have to think about the physical issues around this unlock issue before buying one. I love my husband but even he doesn't want to hear from me 15 times a day!

[evil laugh]

( Sep 14 2006, 11:10:14 AM PDT ) Permalink