Nokia N95 8GB

Apologies for the lack of posts. Work has been pretty busy.

I've got a new phone. It's a Nokia N95 8GB. It's amazing.

The camera is 5MP which means huge amounts of detail and it focusses and shoots really quickly. It is good enough to handle just about any task that doesn't need an SLR.

I took this picture of Westminster Abbey while getting lunch:

The video camera's footage doesn't look like it was shot on a mobile phone. The frame rate is high (30 fps) and the detail is superb. The final footage looks like it comes from a reasonable dedicated digital camcorder.

It connects to the Internet both through its own 3G (or even 3.5G) connection and through a wireless network if there is one within range. I tried reading a few blogs and it is very usable thanks to a big, high-resolution screen.

With 8GB of memory you can store plenty of music and video. In fact, it comes preloaded with Spiderman 3. Having an entire movie on a phone is strange but could be pretty welcome on a long train journey. I think I'll fill it with South Park. It may also displace my iPod for the journey to work. The display quality is good enough to use its TV Out to watch a film or something you've recorded on the camcorder on a decent sized TV - which I did for a bit - and still have it look sharp.

It contains maps to, I think, the entire world - if not the entire world then most of the important bits - but also GPS. That allows you to give it two addresses and ask it to plot a route or one address and ask it to find you a way there. The very idea of sat nav in a phone seems insane. I tried it out and it followed me down Victoria Street pretty efficiently. It can also work out a route between my Hertfordshire and London homes with no trouble at all. I'll try more exotic journeys at some point.

It does have other features like the N-Gage gaming system but that doesn't particularly interest me. I haven't tried it out with e-mail yet but, to be honest, I'm not terribly interested in that either. I'm rarely away from my desk for too long at work so there isn't much need and it is nice to be disconnected sometimes. If you want to do a lot of e-mailing a Blackberry of some description is probably the best way forward.

The phone looks pretty good and the ability to slide the screen up and down to expose either the keypad or the media controls - and change the screen from portrait to landscape - is pretty cool. It's reasonably chunky though - you can't fit features like the ones on this phone in a RAZR.

The performance, which was apparently a problem on the earlier N95, is fine. The applications run pretty smoothly and you can flick around the various menus and applications reasonably freely without slowing it down.

A few days after getting it I'm still somewhat amazed at its features. When it effortlessly tapped into the TPA network; when it quickly found my position by satellite and when I saw the quality of the video it recorded I was stunned. Just a few short years ago carrying around five devices and a generator in a van couldn't get you these kinds of features at this kind of standard.

What a world.