mamamusings

first impressions of nokia n95

I spent a good bit of time in airports yesterday playing with the n95 phone that I won in a drawing at the Nokia event on Thursday. I have to say, I’m impressed.

Things I love:

• Gorgeous screen - big, bright, clear
• Better reception and sound than my Blackjack mean that phone calls are much easier to hear
• Coolest voice dialing ever—I don’t have to record anything, it simply does speech recognition on my voice and looks for a matching entry in my address book. And it works!
• Wifi and 3G, so I get fast data just about everywhere
• Great camera
• Lots of games, including Sudoku

Things I don’t love:

• Sliding it into a snug pocket of a bag causes the sliding screen to open, and the keypad to unlock
• No QWERTY keypad
• No touchscreen or stylus; moving the cursor around with the d-pad is tedious
• The web browser. It takes too many clicks to get to pages I want, uses an annoying interface for moving back through viewing history, and doesn’t seem to store cookies after the phone is turned off.

The big issue for me with any phone is my ability to get data—especially calendar and contact data—from my Exchange server. Happily, there’s a third party tool called RoadSync that does exactly that. I’m using the 30 day trial version right now, but if I decide to stick with the n95 as my primary phone, I’ll definitely purchase it.

Also, I discovered that the n95 has barcode reading software built in. I was really excited about that, thinking that we could use it with PULP, but it turns out it doesn’t work with the kinds of standard UPC barcodes on most products in the US. It works with 2D barcodes (aka QR codes), which are much more common in Asia.

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