The Nokia N96, Nokia's latest multimedia smartphone, will be released in just a few weeks' time. Despite no official announcement from Nokia yet, we have it on good authority that the N96 will be released in August, which is perfect timing for your holiday.

Why for your holiday? Well, not so you can sit on the beach and take calls (though you could if you wanted to, but if you do, you should really think about getting a life!). No, the N96 is a multimedia powerhouse, and is perfect for capturing pictures, video, watching TV, sending your pics and vids directly to Flickr and YouTube - and it'll even help you navigate your way around foreign cities.

Nokia N96 Overview

The Nokia N96 isn't just any old smartphone. It's the successor to the immensely successful N95, and offers not just all the bells and whistles that then N95 had, but a few besides, plus the added advantages of an extended battery life and a smaller form factor.

The key features of the N96 include the following:

• HSDPA and quad band GSM
• Mobile TV
• Symbian S60 3rd edition operating system
• 2.8” QVGA (240 x 320 pixels) LCD TFT display with up to 16 million colors
• 5 megapixel camera with auto-focus and auto-exposure
• Dual-LED camera flash, video light, recording indicator, auto-focus assist light
• Secondary VGA (640 x 480 px) camera for video calls
• Video capture in MPEG-4 up to VGA at 30 fps
• Digital Video Stabilization
• Built-in GPS/A-GPS
• WLAN - IEEE802.11 g/b
• Stereo FM radio (87.5-108MHz, 76-90MHz) with RDS
• Hi-Speed USB 2.0 with Micro USB type B interface
• 3.5mm stereo headset plug , TV-out support (PAL/NTSC)
• Bluetooth 2.0 A2DP stereo/EDR
• 950 mAh battery with up to 220 min talk, 220 hrs standby time, 5 hrs video, 14 hrs music or 4 hrs TV playback
• Dimensions: 103×55x18 mm
• Weight: 125 g

That's one tasty looking smartphone!

Many of these features were available on the N95, so the N96 isn't quite as revolutionary as the N95 was. However, as Nokia have had an extra year for the technology to mature, they've made the whole package much more polished. It's more compact, for example, has longer battery life, and there are a raft of enhanced photographic and video features, ensuring your pics and videos look even better than they did with the N95. There are also dedicated gaming keys as well as a dedicated 3D video accelerator chip, which not only lets you play high-sepc 3D games via the Nokia N-Gage platform, it also enhances the video and mobile TV renderings.

Add to that one-touch uploading of your pics and vids to Flickr and YouTube, plus Mobile TV and the ability to watch YouTube videos natively, and you have the best all round smartphone of the year so far.

Better than the iPhone 3G? Of course - the iPhone may have a good user interface, but its camera and video camera are extremely poor, it has no support for mobile TV, and it's only 3G and has no support for HSDPA (which is ten times faster).

So if you're looking for a smartphone that'll replace your camera, video camera and TV this summer, get yourself a Nokia N96 when they come out next month.

[Source: MobileExpress, Dial-a-phone]