Reality Matters

The finnish giants new Nokia N96 is one beast of a smart phone even by today’s standards. Most mobiles wished they were as feature packed, and had other manufacture’s scrambling to mimic its features. I’m going break down this mobile, and basically fill you in why this mobile should be in your pocket and not in the store window still.

Let’s start with the apparent, it’s form. The N96 is a candy bar slider design, having a hidden keypad, and also sliding it in the opposite direction shows a hidden media keyed key pad. So right from the start this mobile has 2 functions covered, phone calls and media playback, very easily accessed.

It’s very similar to the Nokia n95 in many ways and it also uses the same OS and thus N95 themes will work on the N96. So you’ll not be short of themes as there’s already thousands available.

The screen on this mobile is gorgeous, as it displays 16 million colors. Measuring in at 2.8”, its QVGA LCD TFT screen has a resolution of 240×320 pixels. So basically anything your doing on this mobile is going to be bright, vivid, and colorful. This is great for reading email, surfing the net, watching videos, and making it a real pleasure. Check out mmcforums where you can get Themes for N96 to further make use of the beautiful screen.

Now I’ll point out some of the best features we come to expect from a Nokia smart phone.

Its camera is a 5MP with dual LED flash. The camera is auto focus and auto correction enabled, and has a Carl Zeis Optics Tessar Lens. You can record video at 30fps, and the flash for the mobile doubles a light when recording video. Both camera and video mode offer a lot of options to set like brightness, color, zoom, etc making it a real rival to a standalone digital camera.

The N96 has AGPS on board as well. AGPS means Assisted Global Positioning Software. What that means it has regular GPS but is can pull map data, nearby information about local shops, rest areas, etc using your cellular data or WIfI connection. You can also install familiar GPS software on the N96 as well, like Garmin or TomTom. With its camera, you will also be able to Geo-Tag your photos with the physical location of where you snapped the photo at.

Wifi is also present on the Nokia N96. This feature really comes in handy if you are in an area with bad cellular reception, and you need to check your email, surf the web, or check in on a live news feed on your mobile. Some applications require a mobile broadband connection, this also helps out when you are not a 3G area as well. The phone’s speakers produce a beautiful sound with a great deal of clarity, listening to mp3’s, ringtones and movies is a pleasure. The dual slider with multimedia keys makes listening to Mp3’s an absolute pleasure.

Now to the interface, Series 60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2. So it’s a smart phone at its core, through and through. Users can keep calendar events, notes, and reminders active on it, to keep them on a schedule. Using active standby on the home screen, lets you easily get to your most used features or apps in a snap. With 16GB of flash memory built in to the mobile, you will have plenty of space to fit your photos, videos, and saved multimedia messages without worry about having to remove something to make room for more. Nokia offers the Nokia PC Suite software for your PC or Mac, that lets you sync personal information like calendar events, notes, and also sync music and movies to and from your device. You can also back up your SMS and MMS messages for safe keeping, or to free up space on your mobile.

The N96 may be pricy but once you realize what all its capable of doing, and how many devices it can replace in your pocket or backpack, it doesn’t seem as bad as one might think. If you are looking for a one-in-one gadget that happens to be a mobile, I highly recommend the Nokia N96 with 2 thumbs way up!