Nokia N95 – The (old) new iPhone killer

Up until last week, my N95 was just “the phone I had”.  It was good at some things, average at others.  Then something happened that made me rethink my opinion on the N95… could it have been an iPhone killer all this time, right here under my nose?  This is my story.

Early last year I was on the hunt for a new mobile phone, writing this and that whilst deliberating which handset ticked all (or most) of my boxes.

In the end I decided that the iPhone, whilst winning in the looks department, just didn’t “work” for me.  A lack of MMS support and being locked into an overpriced contract with O2 (assuming an un-jailbroken handset) isn’t something that interested me so I went for my (then) second choice of the Nokia N95 8GB.  Orange gave me a loyalty discount so all was well in the world.

For the next few months I used the phone as a camera, sat nav, browsing the Internet, tweeting and checking emails. Everything the S60 Symbian OS based phone is capable of doing either out of the box or with a free application. Fast forward to last week when I discovered Nokia had it’s own Email application called Nokia Messaging.

Why someone at Nokia didn’t think to include this as standard with the N95 is beyond me.  You can use the built-in Messaging application on the N95 for emails, but it’s really best suited to SMS and MMS.   This new (to me) email application however is a major improvement and whilst won’t compete with the likes of Blackberry for usability, gives me push-like access to my inbox that is a dream to use.
It’s the addition of this single application that has made me reconsider one of the new HTC handsets or the new iPhone.

I know people like lists, so I’ve made my own with reasons why I prefer the N95 (to iPhone):

• 5MP camera
  Whilst it’s not the best camera in the world, it’s good enough for me to no longer need a dedicated camera.
• Physical keypad
  Touch screens are great, but you need to look at the screen to be able to operate it.  I can pretty much navigate my way around, compose text messages, etc without more than a glance at the screen.
• Native MMS support
  Big fail by Apple for me.  Even though I don’t use MMS that often, it’s nice to have and more convenient for a lot of people than sending a photo to email.

Everything else can be pretty much equalled across the two rival handsets, both have platforms that encourage 3rd party application development, nicely extending their usefulness.  Symbian can get a bit clunky with a few apps open though.

The N95 has always had 3G AFAIK, but I’m not sure how/when I get any benefit but Apple made a big deal of it with their 3G iPhone so it must be good…

MP3 and video player capabilities are no match to an iPhone/iPod interface, but there’s no faults with them.

So in conclusion (as I’ve written too much already)

So if you’re looking for a multimedia, Internet-capable handset, don’t want to switch network providers or don’t want to spend £££’s on a new handset, consider the N95