A symbian smart phone that looks and feels very expensive (Nokia N96)

Member Name: Sugardooyoo

Product:	Nokia N96
Date:	28/11/08 (82 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Nice to handle, huge storage, decent camera great for entertainment on the move.

Disadvantages: Screen smears everytime you touch it, flush buttons on keypad a bit fiddly.

I upgraded to this mobile from the Nokia N95 8gb which I loved as I wanted the extra storage capacity (16gb) that the N96 offers.

First impressions upon opening the box was how sleek and slick this phone feels in the hand, it is slimmer and more rounded to the N95 series and the slider has a very satisfying gliding and snicking into place action.

It took me a few days to get used to using it as some of the applications are in different folders and the buttons are flush with the phones surface which looks very posh but can make texting a bit more hit and miss if you don't have nimble fingers!

Battery life is reasonable for a smart phone, I use mine for listening to podcasts whilst on the move and watching the odd tv program via the free BBC IPlayer program (make sure you have an internet add-on with a decent amount of bandwidth in you contract if you want to do this!), and I put mine on charge when I go to bed every night, this usually gets me through the day.

I also use the BBC IPlayer on the N96 over my home wifi to download tv programs to watch when I am in areas where 3g coverage is poor.

The N96 has a 5 mega pixel camera, which while is not good enough to replace a decent digital camera takes very good snapshots in daylight, lowlight photos are very grainy and poor.

One problem that I have encountered with the N96 is that after a couple of weeks of use it can slow down drastically, I have found out that this was due to some podcasts mysteriously ending up in the phones main memory rather than the mass memory storage. Once they had been moved (via my pc and bluetooth) all was well again.

Overall I really love this phone, I thought that my N95 8gb would be hard to beat but this is a worthy successor from Nokia.

Summary: Lovely posh looking phone, BBC IPlayer works very well, decent sized clear screen - I love it

Processing/Quality:
Reliability:
Ease of use:
Sound quality:
Variety of features: