Nokia N96 – Successor of a Successful Phone

The Nokia N96 as everyone knows is the successor of the most successful Nokia mobile phones ever the N95. Being a descendent of a great phone there was a large amount of expectation from the Nokia N96. Unfortunately the Nokia N96 couldn’t keep up the glory of its predecessor.

The time when Nokia Mobile Phones released Nokia N95, it was the giant in the market, and there wasn’t any potential threat to Nokia N95 in design, features or performance but now the things are totally different. The N96 uses Dual ARM 9 264 MHZ CPU which is a slower than that of N95’s CPU. There doesn’t seem to be any valid reason for this downgrade, though on second thoughts it looks like it was done to improve battery life but the battery life is worse than that of N95. No to worry too much the mediocre battery and the CPU don’t affect the performance of the phone. The user interface is very smooth, quick and just maybe some very demanding application or game can show the difference between the performance of the two mobile phones.

The design of N96 has been inherited from the Nokia N81 and is very attractive; the build quality however is not up to the standard of a high end mobile phone. The cheaper plastic employed in Nokia N96 is susceptible to scratches.

The form factor of N96 is dual slide i.e. you can move the top slider either way up and down; pushing the panel upwards will reveal the numeric keypad and pushing it down will reveal the 4 dedicated keys used for music and games.

As far as memory is concerned the Nokia N96 is excellent. It has a large internal memory of 16GB and provides room for further expansion using a micro SD memory card. In short, you can extend the memory of N96 to 32GB. The 2.8 inches screen of N96 is marvellous; It is brilliant even under direct sunlight, no complaints from display section too.

The inbuilt 5 megapixel Carl Zeiss lens camera complemented by powerful dual LED flash captures superb pictures producing a far better quality than the pictures taken by other phones boasting a 5 mega pixel camera. The pictures are excellent in all lighting conditions, this camera can capture even moving objects with great precession. However, the capture button can be difficult to press but it isn’t a major problem.

The Nokia N96 Mobile comes with a good DVB – H tuner, enabling it to receive digital TV broadcasts. Moving on to one of the main entertainment functions of the Nokia N96 - the mp3 play, which does not disappoint with excellent all around sound quality. The loud speakers are placed on the right side, top and bottom of the phone. In landscape mode you can use the kickstand to place the phone on the desk at the best angle for watching TV / video. The loudspeakers will now be on the top left and right of the phone giving a feel of mini television, looks very attractive.

The N96 wasn't really intended to take the market by storm and turn the world around. Maybe it was meant to quietly update the top multimedia gadget of the house. Almost every phone manufacturer has a good range of mobiles that can challenge Nokia N96 and most of them have Touchscreen, mp3 players and video playback functions. Nokia is not yet concentrating on Touchscreen which is the latest trend in mobile world. Moreover Nokia N96 has a heavy price tag compared to other mobiles with similar functionalities however the Nokia N96 has a great software package that comes in an utterly user-unfriendly shell.

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