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So the other day i got the N95, after many thoughts about a Palm, Sony's new P1i and the N95 i made my choice. The most expencive of the 3 at a whopping £500 retail, it really is a lot of phone for a lot of money. I got the phone for free on contract.
The phone is more like a copy of win2k, its sybian 9 software but feels very similar. The "home" screen or desktop is a lot like windows, you have quick launch icons, network symbol, shortcuts and the time, and i mean and actual clock image.
There are 2 main menus, kind of like media center and the start button. Media center takes you to a colour full animated GUI and has all your view needs. Comes with full Divx and mpeg software for watchin any movie, also supports a few file types. One of the new features on mobiles is the ability to blog straight from your phone.
The second menu is for settings and all the usualy suspect functions of a phone. There is a busines section which includes an office suite, bar code reader, adobe reader and a zip function.
The most noticeable extra are a file manager, application manager and a device manager. These are all user freindly and remind me of windows.
Going back to the home screen simply requires the red button being pushed, but if you do it while in a game, simply hold the standard menu button and like vista or mac os, it will show all other apps open with a icon for each app.
The Wifi function surprised me, i though i would need a lot of settings, but the N95 can be set to search for wifi continually or just when you want, this is good for battery. Once you want wifi, if finds all available points very quickly, amazing i thought as after only 10 seconds i was surfing the web. No extra settings, just my user name and password. Looking at the settings more closely, there is the home networking function which aparently is the new thing for sharing media content. Basically i can link to my home network, and where ever i am in my house any computer can access the files i choose from my phone. This is great, as it works both ways, say you torrent a movie and dont want to burn it to disk and spend an hour waiting for it to encode, simply access your computer via the N95 and then use the included video out cables to link up your PC to the N95. This then effectively makes the need to buy a apple TV or to some extent a media center pc redundant.
I was interested to see how well the GPS worked, well being that im on a campus with lots of wifi, the GPS wasnt the best a gettin an exact fix, though to withing 20 miles. But i had read i didnt need the GPS reciever for maps. So i thought i would use Lboro wifi, very simply downloaded a map from my house to lboro, took 10 seconds and the voice function was great. While the Gps reciever isnt there yet the maps and map finder function is great, it has been around for a while and so i think they have got a good stable piece of software here.
Finally the camera, 5 mega pixel, good camera, good quality, best on market. The lens size let me down, but at the same time, im not gona take award winning photos on them. The video is amazing, best on a phone i have ever seen.
Some Conns.
Battery life : is rubbish, i mean bad, calls are ok, texts, bluetooth, even web search, but games and GPS are a hog.
Cost : i would get this phone, but im going to use everything to the max, some wont and the blackberry, palm are much better business solutions, also an exteranal GPS device and software can be picked up for £50.
Memory : 5MP pics take up so much room, and with 160 mb of memory, it requires a memory card, good thing though its not new flash, so 1gb costs £8 or less
RAM : while having one of best phone CPU and a lot of RAM, it still isnt enough, games and web and bluetooth and phone fine. try texting instead of a call and it runs out.
Thats it for my little review, time for a summary, great for the high end user, got everything in one. Took me away from SE phones and i can say i dont know what i ever did without this phone. I can say there are cheaper phones that have similar functionality, and while the GPS impressed me, some may want to get a symbian phone and buy a external GPS, though they arnt exactly 100%.
All in all i give the phone 9/10, as it does everything it says on the tin, and i think that if the conns were fixed it would add wieght and money which would have been bad.
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dont know how i used to drive about town without it 
