Everybody was talking about the Nokia N95, you know what? They spoke too soon! I gifted myself a Nokia N95 a month ago and decided to hold this review until I fully experience the phone. Nokia N95 is the highly feature rich phone among all other phones in the Nseries line up, but yet it’s extremely light compared to its brother N80. It feels almost as if the battery has been removed from the phone, just 120 grams.
Talking about the specs, N95 boasts a brilliant 5 megapixel autofocus camera accompanied with Carl Zesis optics. It also has an inbuilt GPS chip which helps you navigate through the streets. Let’s talk about these in detail.
Camera: The 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zesis auto focusing lens makes it one of the best camera phones ever. The rear camera is protected with two sliding mechanical covers. For those who are lucky enough to be blessed with Video Calling network support, this phone also includes a secondary video call camera for that purpose.
Before taking photos, you’ll have to uncover the camera and wait for the camera application to load. Usually, this takes anywhere between 4 – 8 seconds. Nokia N95 has a dedicated capture button at the top. Like most Digital Camera, by pressing the capture button half way through, it’ll autofocus (takes about 3 – 6 seconds to autofocus). Now, you can fully press the capture button to complete the sequence. It takes about 5 – 10 seconds for the application to process the image and save it. Overall, you need about 15 – 25 seconds to capture a photograph. Talking about video capturing, this phone can record videos at 640×480 (DVD quality video, which is pretty awesome compare to my previous N72).
Inbuilt GPS: N95 is one of those very few smartphones equipped with an inbuilt GPS receiver. The inbuilt GPS chip is located under the keypad and the GPS application advices you to keep your keypad open to improve the accuracy.
You cannot directly download maps to your phone, but you should use the PC application called Nokia MapLoader to install new maps. Sadly, the MapLoader isn’t included on the CD which ships with the phone, you’ll have to download it from here. You should also keep in mind that the inbuilt GPS chip doesn’t work with any third party GPS application like TomTom.
Memory: Nokia N95 is blessed with a generous 160 MB of internal memory and microSD card slot for which a 1GB memory card was included. I didn’t bother replacing the 1GB card with another 2GB microSD card.
Drawbacks
Battery Life: Nokia N95 comes with BL-5F battery, which is comparatively wider in size to BL-5C (which ships with most Nokia phones). With moderate usage this phone last a day and requires over night charging. I won’t blame Nokia, as the GPS chip and WiFi hardware are the major suckers of battery.
Front Buttons: Nokia has significantly improved N95’s keypad with a hump shaped buttons which gives better tactile feel; however, I’m not happy with the placement of End (Red) button and the clear button. Both the buttons are quite close to each other and I tend to accidentally press the end button while messaging.
Freezing: With great features, it’s nothing uncommon to expect this phone to freeze up, but the worst part is that it hangs up when you least expect it to be. The only possible way to unfreeze this phone would be to pop out the battery. And this atleast happens once a day.
Conclusion: Nokia N95 is a feature rich phone, but as the tag line goes… it’s not one thing, it’s many! Hopefully, problems like freezing will be fixed by the release of next firmware update.
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This is not a paid review, nor did I receive a free N95 to try out 
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