When you buy a Nokia N95, you get a buzz of excitement as you look at the cool exterior with the innovative dual sliding keypads and huge 2.8″ screen. You know this phone is good, but you have no idea just how good until you turn it on.
As the N95 comes to life, you see a host of menu items offering features you’d never expect from a mobile phone. You can’t help but wonder whether it’s a phone you’ve bought, or a DVD player, or camcorder, or iPod, or even a GPS Sat-Nav device.
In fact, the Nokia N95 is all of these things, and much more.
Perhaps the most impressive feature of the N95 is its GPS Sat-Nav functionality. With maps for over 100 different countries, full route planning and even voice-based turn-by-turn directions (for a monthly service charge), the N95 can replace a traditional car-based Sat-Nav device at the touch of a button.
The maps are all fully animated in both 2D and 3D, and will turn smoothly as you turn. You can even send your location to another N95 user, who can then see at a glance the best route to take to meet up with you.
In addition, the N95’s maps offer all sorts of places of interest, from ATMs to petrol stations, restaurants to hotels, and will tell you the nearest place of interest to your current location within seconds. It’ll even tell you how to get there!
Every mobile phone has a camera these days, but the N95’s is something else, sporting a class-leading 5 megapixel camera within its small frame. Of course, megapixels aren’t everything, and you want a camera capable of taking high quality photos.
How does a high quality Carl Zeiss lens sound, complete with autofocus, autoexposure and white balance adjustment? The N95 offers it all.
You can also upload your pics instantly to Flickr or a variety of other Web photo sites, all at the click of a button.
You’ll love the N95’s video recording capabilities. The N95 will let you record video at full VGA level at up to 30 frames per second – that’s the same as DVD.
It even offers image stabilization to stop camera shakes ruining your videos.
You can record as much video as you have storage space for – and with the N95 supporting up to 2GB of storage via microSD memory cards, that’s a lot of video!
Featuring a huge 2.8″ screen that can display 16 million different colours, the N95’s video playback is superb. Whether it’s your own video, or those you download over the Internet or your mobile network, the N95 is like having a mini-DVD in your pocket.
You can even upload your videos to any of a number of video-sharing Web sites. Just imagine videoing your daughter as she learns to ride her bike for the first time, uploading the video and then emailing her Grandparents a link to it, so they can see her achievement for themselves just minutes after it happened.
The N95 also offers superb music playing abilities. Not only does it come with an MP3 player and FM radio, it also provides full support for Podcasts (both music and video), which you can download from the Internet or over your mobile network and listen to (or watch) at leisure.
You can create playlists and synchronize them with your playlists on Microsoft’s Windows Media Player. It also comes with a 3.5″ jack, letting you plug any pair of headphones into it, as well as Bluetooth support for wireless listening, and a set of extremely loud internal speakers.
The N95 comes with a fantastic full-featured web-browser, as well as a tonne of other online apps, including Instant Messaging, an RSS Feed reader, email, Skype-like VoIP, and real time video streaming.
No more struggling to read all the info on a page – the N95’s Web browser has been designed to display web pages in full, and then zoom into the areas you want to read using its joypad to scroll around the page and zoom in at will.
Featuring Wi-Fi and super-fast HSDPA for downloads that are 10x faster than 3G, the N95 will download data at up to 3.6Mbps. In addition, it’s also a quad-band phone, letting you make a call almost anywhere in the world.
The N95 also connects to your PC through USB, Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, and can connect to your TV so you can watch your videos, play games or listen to your music through your home entertainment system. It’ll even let you control your TV via its UPnP technology (with a TV that supports UPnP).
Add to this the ability to upload your videos and pictures directly to Flickr, your own blog, or a myriad of other Web-based services at the touch of a button, and you have an amazing pocket multimedia powerhouse that lets you share your content with the rest of the world in seconds.
Finally, the N95 comes equipped with a seriously-fast graphics chip for superb 3D games featuring graphics better than a PlayStation’s.
These can be viewed on the N95’s excellent 16 million colour screen, or on your TV – perfect for whiling away a few hours of boredom, whether you’re on the move or at home.
The 3D graphics chip also works with the N95’s maps, providing true 3D animation of the maps that you see, right from a view of the Earth all the way down to street level – just like Google Earth.
The Nokia N95 offers all the functionality of a camera, Sat-Nav device, camcorder, iPod, PC, and DVD player in one pocket-sized device.
Nokia are calling the N95 a “multimedia computer” and with good reason – this phone will outperform many laptops with its multimedia abilities. It’s already won Popular Science magazine’s “Best of What’s New” award as well as being voted the ‘Best Mobile Imaging Device in Europe 2007’ by TIPA (Technical Image Press Association), the largest photo and imaging press association in Europe.
There is no phone on the market that can touch the Nokia N95. Whatever you want from a handheld gadget, the N95 does it. If you want a phone that will be the envy of your friends, as well as an invaluable assistant to your life, you need an N95.
See how good the N95’s video recording capabilities are with these sample videos.
To help whet your appetite further, here are some sample photos taken by the Nokia N95’s 5 megapixel camera.
