(This post has been authorised by Ruthie)
Geeklawyer is not one to bear a grudge. Honest. It’s true that he has had an unfortunate experience with the Nokia N800 Internet tablet. They show signs of making up for it with a great new toy: the Nokia N95 smartphone.
Geeklawyer has been sticking with a functional but dull Nokia 6230 awaiting the arrival of the N95. And he been doing so since September of last year.
The wait is over and, damn, it was worth it. It works seamlessly with Mac OSx unlike the crappy MDA Pro (Ruthie has just acquired an O2 XDA - the same inadequate model Geeklawyer has joyfully ditched). It has a 5 megapixel camera, high definition video, email, an FM radio, MP3 player and photo and video gallery. It has a proper sized earphone jack so one can use decent headphones and not the silly ‘phone only’ specials other phones have. It has a MicroSD slot with cards available up to 2Gigs. A fast USB2 connector allows for proper synchronization with a PC and one can synchronize over bluetooth or wireless.
Best of all it has an inbuilt GPS receiver. This takes some time to start up and hunt satellites, and this caused Geeklawyer some concern, but when it does start it is reasonably accurate for a GPS unit of this type and one can pay for download-able maps. Geeklawyer bought the UK maps. This functionality was given a brief test and it worked well but Geeklawyer intends to take it hiking for a serious test.
On the connectivity front it has all bases covered: it has bluetooth and, wonderfully, Wi-Fi it is also HSDPA capable, one of only a handful of phones with it. HSDPA can give near broadband speeds when there is decent coverage: pages downloaded in a flash and it’s capabilities as a Mac Powerbook modem lead Geeklawyer to regard this as the best breed of smartphone available so far: the MDA Pro has a better size of screen but the N95 has a superior browser: Opera.
This is a truly excellent phone and well worth the wait. Provided it doesn’t screw up in the next few weeks Geeklawyer may be prepared to forgive the N800 fiasco.
Sounds like a decent piece of kit, what are the roaming download charges like though….
Ah, the roaming charges. I suspect I will still be anally raped on those!
This looks like a pay-per-post. Hard times in chambers, GL?
Fair enough. Not a fan personally of the combined devices. I prefer to lug around a small phone (not a Blackberry, though) with Exchange email capabilities (for work - gmail for everything else), and then take a PDA with me when I need all the bells and whistles (Dell Axim x51v is my current model).
If you use the camera and GPS, however, I can see how the n95 would be appealing.
There is a minimalist school of phones but I’m not signed up. I was using the GPS this morning for example when out walking - very swish indeed: not useful but at the weekend when I’m hiking it’sll be interesting to see how useful it is.
Again, the camera is a 5 megapixel unit (yes pixel count isn’t a good indicator of quality) and very handy when I cant have a decent camera with me.
I just got one and I was told to get a new battery, as it won’t last long, especially if you use 5 Megapixels camera, etc.
It still annoys me that Nokia did not get the transfer of sim and phone memory data to work as smoothly as Sony Erricson did for e.g. non-windows software users.
I had no problem transferring old sim stuff so I don’t have an opinion. I am hacked off their is no OSx version of the connectivity suite and if you plug it into A Mac it doesn’t show up as a USB drive. At the moment I have to use PCSuite on my PC games machine: PCSuite didn’t seem to work in Parallels. I’ll hunt for an Opensource PCSuite equivalent someone must have done a hack.