THE NOKIA N96 SMARTPHONE
The Nokia N96 comes from an honorable lineage. Its predecessor, the Nokia N95, was one of the best converged devices of its time. The introduction of the Apple iPhone and its imitators, however, changed the games. Although the Nokia N96 is a big improvement of its ancestors, will it be enough?
The Nokia N96 screen, which takes up most of the front of the phone, is a 2.8-inch (7.1centimeter) TFT QVGA screen that measures 240 pixels high by 320 pixels wide. The display contains 16 million colors (the same as the Apple iPhone), and the picture is indeed bright and colorful. The screen is easy to read in all lighting conditions except direct sunlight, which tends to wash out the colors somewhat.
The Nokia N96 runs on the Symbian 9.3 operating system and has 16 gigabytes (GB) of internal memory. A MicroSDHC port on the left side can hold an additional memory card of up to 32 GB in size, brining the total available memory for the Nokia N96 up to a maximum of 48 GB. Unfortunately, the MicroSDHC cards slides deeply into the phone, making it difficult to press the card in far enough to slide into place, and even more difficult to remove the card without tweezers.
The Nokia N96 slides up to reveal a standard 12-key board for phone dialing. The buttons are all flush with the housing, making dialing without looking impossible. Unfortunately, the overhanging phone housing also interferes slightly with pressing the top row keys, although this is hardly a drawback unique to the Nokia N96 smartphone—most sliding phones have this problem to one degree or another. Although not too much of a hindrance while dialing phone numbers, pecking out text messages on this keyboard is more of a hassle that it should be.
Audio playback is quite versatile, capable of playing back MP3, WMA, AAC, and HE-AAC sound formats. Ringtones can be made for either MP3, AAC, WAV, MIDI, orRealRingtones. The Nokia N96 comes with 3.5mm headphones and a microphone adapter.
Powered by a 264-MHz CPU with video acceleration, the Nokia N96 can play videos in the Flash, RealVideo, WMV9, MPEG-4 SP, and H.264 formats, and as an integrated DVB-H tuner for mobile TV. There is a flip-out stand for viewing lengthy videos without tiring out your arms and hands. Finally, at the top is a front-facing pinhole-sized VGA camera for video calls using 3G networks.
The Carl Zeiss digital camera is prominently displayed, ringed in a silver housing. The camera features five megapixels, auto focus, and can zoom up to twenty times magnification. The Nokia N96s dual-LED flashbulb replaces the single LED of its predecessor, the Nokia N95, but is still not as bright as some of the N96s competitors.
Overall, the Nokia N96 suffers from being simultaneously too big and too small. Although the Nokia N96 is a much slimmer phone than its predecessor, the Nokia N95, it is wider and taller, and with a thickness of 17.6 millimeters and a weight of 4.4 ounces (125 grams), the Nokia N96 if still not quite able to compete with the sleekness of the Apple iPhone or the Touch Diamond. At the same time, though, some of the buttons are just a little too small and cramped for quick and easy trouble-free use.
Nokia s flagship smartphone may be a powerhouse, but it is also slightly clumsy compared to its competitors. Can the Nokia N96 stand up to the iPhone and it s clones? That has yet to be seen.
