First off, have a look at Mike’s robust character assasination of the Nokia N95 (and the chumps wanting to get one) on my earlier post:
Link: SMS Text News » My Nokia N95 arrives tomorrow
Reasons for getting the Emperor’s New Phone, er, I mean N95:
WiFi…ooops, plenty of other handsets have that – for years in some cases.OK, must be the 3.5mm headset jack. Hmmm….fancy a bent audio plug?
Safari browser? Flash player? Maps? stereo Bluetooth? available elsewhere.
GPS? only if you plan to spend 4-ish minutes starting up, are OK with standing stock still while it acquires a lock, happy to have the slide open all the time (forget Landscape mode then), and never intend driving under a bridge or through a tunnel, or downtown, or anywhere where there is less visible sky than, say, the Salisbury plains.
Battery life? Better carry a few spares then for the day’s business chap.
Shiny looks? You’ll have lots of chances to show it off while you are waiting for it to reboot, after trying something tricky like receiving an SMS whilst browsing a website.
Estimated ‘Time To Chumpness’ for the N95? 3 months, tops.
My prediction? Prepare to be underwhelmed….
(disclaimer: I’m going off experience of 3 months near-continuous – and initially ecstatic – N95 enforced usage. Couldn’t get back to my N73 with Bluetooth GPS module fast enough. Sorry to be a downer, but if I’d parted with real cash to purchase this phone I’d be using the GPS to locate a nearby clifftop. Luckily my wife would have time to work out why I was unhappy, book therapy and get me well again before I got a meaningful GPS result. And I ain’t alone.)
I am on your plane of thought Mike. Totally.
Let me tell you why I had to get an N95.
I’m a mobile geek of sorts. People on trains look at me like I’m some (rather old, no glasses) Harry Potter when I sit down next to them and take out one phone. Then another phone. Then another. And perhaps, if they’re lucky, I might actually be carrying a forth handset. Eyes widen. Comments abound.
If you’re in Scotland or the North East, where folk are a little bit more friendly to strangers bearing tons of high tech handsets (I’m not a terrorist, mind, these are all top of the range handsets, not your Nokia Christmas Cracker handsets), then you’re generally guaranteed to get some sort of ‘You like your mobiles dontcha?’ comment.
So here I am, a self fulfilling prophecy. I write a mobile blog. So I feel like I should have up to date related technology. I am a technology fiend as well, so any excuse to get the latest gadgets…. oh… well, I write a mobile blog… soo…. woops… KERPLUNK! That’s another 500 quid on a Nokia N93.
I was sat in the rather beautiful gardens of Mar Hall discussing a range of business related elements with Hetty on Saturday. We’d just agreed not to start a new company, not at the moment, anyway, so that conversation theme had just ended. Hetty then volunteered that her sister, Charlotte, a shit-hot TV producer, had just turned up bearing a Nokia N95.
I was momentarily speechless.
“Er. Sorry, you mean the new one? The NEW Nokia N95?” I asked.
“Yeah, it’s really nice, very light,” came Hetty’s innocent reply.
Arse.
Well that’s it then. I wasn’t really obsessing much over the N95. I was, until a few seconds ago, quite delighted to let the other geeks out there get hold of their N95s, do their unpacking photos and get generally excited about the handset’s arrival. I was content to let the furore calm down and then maybe get hold of one later on. Perhaps after I’d seen a colleague’s device and tried it out.
I was exercising Geek restraint. Afterall, I saw the device at Nokia’s NokiaWorld conference last year and thought it was very cool. I have a ton of problems about Nokias being crap for music — the experience being nowhere near as good or comparable to that of an iPod.
So all was good, until I discovered Charlotte had one.
Charlotte is a normob. A normal mobile phone user. She uses her phone a ton, granted — you do, if you work as a freelance TV producer. You’re always on location, having to phone people to get them out of bed and so on. Your mobile is your office. You often find TV producers — and others working in TV — tend to spend a ton of cash on their mobile phone bills. But here was Orange, handing a normob a Nokia N95?
Disbelief and then recognition. The N95 isn’t the N93. Not at all. It’s not a specialist phone. It’s a top-of-the-range N73 killer. It’s the next best thing, the best thing you can buy in the Vodafone store. You can’t walk down the street at the moment without seeing an N95 advertised somewhere.
Ergo I can’t walk about not having had intimate knowledge of the handset, can I? I am not, afterall, just a mobile phone journalist. 😉 I have to know things. Play with things. Get annoyed with things. Delight in things.
I also reasoned that it’s worth while having T-Mobile pay the 600 quid for the handset for me up front. I assume they extended my contract. Who knows. There was no discussion or no agreement.
“I might get one actually, it’s got a 5 megapixel camera,” says Hetty.
Ok, my decision is made. I can’t in good faith be running a mobile related blog and have everyone around me getting N95s while I sit there at the back of the classroom with my E61, N73 and N93…. 😉
So it arrives this morning. I’ll get hold of it later on tonight if I have time.
Question for you Ewan. How many mobile phones do you carry with you on a regular basis, and what do you use them for?
Me, I have an E61 for Good email and an N80ie for the rest of the stuff. I don’t particularly like the E61 for making calls, but it rocks for email. The N80ie sucks for email, but makes calls and does the multimedia stuff oh so well. Plus it also has my favourite selection of card games on it, whereas all the E61 appears to have is golf. Hmm..
Well when I’m traveling I have my laptop bag — which is heavy — so I figure, I might as well stick a few more phones in there for the fun of it. So right now I have three handsets — the E61, the N73 and N93. Usually the N73 sits in the bottom of my bag but more recently I’ve resurrected it and been enjoying using it.
Generally, if I’m in London, suited and booted, I’ll carry just one handset — the E61. I feel a bit naked though, because it doesn’t have a camera 😐
Three handsets? Blimey. Thank god they all use the same charger connector 🙂
How do you manage to make sure people call you on the right one? That’s the bit that’s baffling me at the moment.. Maybe I dreamt it, but there must be a service where you can get the same outbound number on more than one SIM, and even cooler if all the phones would ring at once when someone called that number.
I need one number to rule them all – I think there will be something coming out shortly to help.
Meantime people call me on my main number and that works. Badly…
Whats needed is one of those nice funky chunky personal number services, that 1. actually works, 2. doesn’t cost me a fortune to run for outbound and 3. can do text. Oh, and 4. I can set the outbound CLI on all my handsets to be that. And text from it.
Oh wait, I’m dreaming again.. sigh 🙁
It’s just so frustrating when you know the technology to do it all is not exactly rocket science..
I reckon that’s coming soon!
Alex — They only operate in the States at the moment, but check out what you can do with TalkPlus.
And from the snappily titled: Why TalkPlus is Important? What Matters to You?
“I have phone numbers for home, home office, office, personal cell phone (Treo), business cell phone(Blackberry), and a couple of others that I use daily. With TalkPlus aliasing technology I can make them all appear on my cell phone, just like a virtual number. I can make and receive calls with the full presence of my telephone number. If I call on work business, I can place the call from my business number and that’s what the called party will see on their display. In short, the identity of my telephone number is extended to my mobile phone, complete with Caller ID information.”
Now if TalkPlus’s control panel could integrate with your presence on Jaiku…
;-O
N95: Further points…
Just to reinforce my previous comment, now elevated to the dizzying height of an SMSTextNews post (!), I thought I’d do a little GPS trial, N95 vs. N73.
I fired up a decent GPS app (Viewranger – uses memory card maps, not networked ones) on each handset, and set it to work as you would in a car/cycling use case – i.e. disabled screensaver, GPS on.
The N95 was using its own GPS, the N73 was using a £30 Bluetooth GPS module off eBay, which handily uses a clone of the old Nokia BL-5C battery found in the 6630/6680/N70.
Everything was fully charged up, on a windowsill with lots of sky visible, both GPS’s locked, displays the same brightness etc etc, no calls, nothing else running (e.g. WiFi on the N95, weird presence apps etc).
The N95 lasted 3 hours before the low battery warning came on.
After the same 3 hours the N73…..wait for it…hadn’t lost a single bar of battery capacity. AND, the N73 battery is at least 6 months old, having been my at-least-one-charge-per-day multimedia workhorse.
Now the Viewranger GPS app used here won Nokia’s award last year for navigation, so it ain’ no pup. It wasn’t asking the phone’s processors to do anything hard either, as the GPS (and hence the displays) weren’t moving.
I know for a fact that the BT GPS battery lasts at least 9 hours, having tested it previously. And given it’s a very common BL-5C battery, carrying spares is no issue if your GPS day is longer than 9hrs.
During the same day, I’d have had to charge the N95 completely, twice. Or carried 2 spare batteries.
And this is assuming you aren’t using it for things like, er, making calls or taking pictures. Or moving around.
So all up the N95 is not a TomTom killer. It is not a Garmin or Magellan killer. It may dent the digicam business a fraction, but given the shutter lag and startup delay, not much. Death of the iPod? not yet (but musicphones in general are doing that, hence the recent dropping of DRM by Apple as they saw their target market share shrink to the size of a walnut).
Jack of all trades, master of none. If you were going out of the house with only a back jeans pocket for storage then the N95 represents a compromise of music player, satnav, internet browser, still/vid camera and – oh yeah – phone, that most could live with (assuming you are OK with a reboot every now & then). But all these functions are still far & away best done by their dedicated conterparts.
Cheers,
Mike
http://symbianguru.typepad.com/welcome/2007/04/why_im_passing_.html#more Pretty much mirrors my take on the N95, albeit from a US (non-3G) perspective.
For me, the killer disappointment is the inability to be spontaneous with geotagging/uploading of images. Once you have used a point-click-geotag-upload app like Zonetag or MobUp, both with Flickr, you don’t want anything less.
Maybe FP2 later this year will sort it, or the 6110, possibly, maybe…..please mr Nokia?
Lol, interesting to read this and then find a link to my own blog, posted by someone else, in the comments.
I wanted to comment towards Ewan, though. How you were strong until others got it. I’m in the same boat, which is actually the reason behind my post. if I put it on my site, I’m accountable to the statements, lol.
I think the N95 might help Nokia turn their business around, even in the U.S. They’ve started a whole new way of releasing phones with it, and it’s obviously well-featured.
I didn’t like it at first. It just doesn’t scream “you want me” like the black N80 did or my N73 does. To me, it more says “you want me cause I’m the shit, and I can do it all, and everyone else has me.” There’s a negative difference there, I think.
I also, as posted, just don’t think it’s too much of an improvement over the N73, specifically if you already have a BT GPS receiver to use with the N73.
Balls – regretting the N95 in my hand now..
🙁
One of my clients — very definitely a normob! — has just txted me to say he phoned Orange this afternoon to find a better business tarrif (his last month’s bill was £170) and they’ve given him unlimited calls to landlines, 100 txts and… an N95.
He mentioned that the GPS will come in handy.
Do I tell him to get an N93/N73 instead?
And switch to an E65 on Three?
How to make yourself popular, eh?
They’re giving them out like sweeties!
You’re probably better letting him do as he wishes, unless he’s up for changing?
T-Mob offered me one on the lowest Flext tariff the other day, subject to an 18 month new contract of course. I sort of declined.. I must resist. I don’t ‘need’ one, it’s just a ‘nice to have’.
I keep repeating that to myself and stay well clear of mobile shops..
Wonder if there’s a Paul McKenna CD for phone addiction?
Meant to say ‘for free’ on that last post.. and they had some in stock in store too.
Buy it buy it buy it…