nokia n95 8gb review

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Average Ratings

Screen Quality	9.3/10
Battery Life	7.1/10
Features	9.1/10
Reception	8.4/10
Style	8.4/10
Value for Money	8.4/10
Reviewer Rating	8.7/10
Overall Rating	8.5/10

89% Recommended25 out of 28 Reviews

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By Guest. on 25th Mar 2008

Guest.'s Ratings

Reviewers Network	O2
Time Phone Owned	1 - 6 Months
Screen Quality	10/10
Battery Life	9/10
Features	9/10
Reception	10/10
Style	10/10
Value for money	10/10
Overall value	10/10
Guest.'s recommendation

Good Points

+ Does everything exceedingly well
+ Value for money
+ Revolutionary
+ Genuine all-in-1 replacement product

Bad Points

- Only a few small niggles: 3G, GPS, Sending SMS, and Nokia's attempt on PDA convergence

General Comments

+ Everything works, and works exceeding well on the Nokia N95 8GB: GPS, Navigation (NokiaMap/MGMaps/Voice Nav), Camera & Video, PDA Integration (Contacts/Notes/To-Do), Video player, etc etc.
+ Great looking phone. Great screen. Great keypad. Everything works very well
+ Battery life very good, much better than expected. I use the phone for Business and have nowhere near even approached 'battery low'
+ Internet surfing is great. In fact, overall, pound-for-pound it beats both my laptop and desktop for getting hold of information. In some respects the web browser is better too than Explorer/Firefox
+ I can honestly say the N95 has revolutionized the way I work, how I listen, watch, surf and go about my day in general
+ There are umpteen features I've yet to explore: Internet Calls, S-Video output to TV, N-Gage Games, Barcode reader
+ It does the job of "just being a phone" and "the simple basics" very well. e.g. the ear-piece speaker is very good unlike my old Sony Ericsson, the keypad is easy to use, speaker phone is very clear (both mike & speaker)
+ The phone can viably replace the following devices: Sat Nav, Camera, Camcorder, PDA, mp3 player - making a huge cost saving
+ The 'Search' function is fantastic
+ Watching a full movie is actually a viable option (screen, sound, battery)

- Why is it so complicated to send an SMS Message?! After clicking "New Message", you're presented with the choice: Text, Multimedia, Audio, Email. Surely it should be a configurable option somewhere e.g. make Text SMS the default
Next, you need to choose the recipient, which is another convoluted process. Yes, its logical, but it takes so long. Options-Add Recipient-OK. The upshot is that the notion of sending a 'quick' SMS is no longer valid. I can live with this, but only because I don't send too many SMS's

- 3G signal drop out. For no obvious reason, the 3G signal sometimes drops out. This can last for days. Then suddenly it comes back. Its really annoying. The only time I wanted to do a video call, 3G signal wasn't present (even being in a known. From reading various threads it seems to be a a common problem with the N95.

- GPS takes a long time to fix the initial GPS position. Again, another known problem. Its not the end of the world since I can wait 10-20mins to get the fix before I need to use the Sat Nav, its both annoying and inconvenient (especially in emergencies)

- "Standby Mode" is great, but
1. Its great that "Calendar" shows meetings for forthcoming days, but when you enter the Calendar application, it just shows you a list of To-Do items for Today. So I see a list of To-Do notes for the day, and not meetings & calendar entries. Its perhaps a matter of getting used to the way the N95 works, but I can already see my To-Do notes via 2 other icons on the front screen.
2 . The "To-Do" summary shows "14 to-do notes not done". Its a useless piece of info for me, what would be better is to show the high priority notes e.g. Call Accountant!". I'm amazed that this trick has been missed by Nokia

- The display of the To-Do notes is clumsy. A lot of space is wasted display the 'date' field, which for me is really unimportant, and wastes valuable screen space. The consequence is less characters to display what the note actually is. The To-Do notes are not easily readable with such few characters

- Again on the point of creating new entries for anything - there is never a 1-click quick way of doing so. e.g. creating a new Meeting or To-Do Note. Its always 3-clicks: Options - New Entry - Meeting. Painful!
- Even though I often use the phone in the horizontal mode, I never switch to using the FWD/REW/PLAY/STOP keys on the left hand side. They seem to have no use for Games, Photos or Internet. Only Video. On the rare occasions I use the Video, the usual keys can suffice. Just a point rather than a gripe

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