For anyone who wants their phone to be all things to all men, Nokia’s flagship N95 ought to have been the answer to their dreams. It had a five megapixel digital camera, fast internet, POP3 and IMAP email support, plus decent music and video-playing capabilities and a built-in GPS.
But we were concerned with just too many things for it to win us over completely. Build quality, for one, felt too cheap for a phone so expensive, battery life was short and it was pretty chunky, too. Nokia improved things with the release of the N95 8GB, introducing a higher capacity battery, more memory and better design, but this also had problems, too, not least a lack of memory expansion. And now, at last, it’s the turn of its successor, the N96. This phone is set to be launched in August and, surely, this time Nokia has got it right. Hasn’t it? I’ve got my hands on a preproduction sample to find out if Nokia has finally fixed the problems and turned its flagship media phone into the desirable handset it always deserved to be.
First Look: Nokia N96 - TrustedReviews