Digital Trends

Nokia N96 February 16th, 2009 | by Nick Mokey

Features and Design

On paper, the N96 stacks up right alongside with or above nearly every other smartphone on the market in terms of the sheer hardware Nokia has been able to fold inside. Start with 16GB of internal memory, add a 5-megapixel camera with LED flash; media player; FM radio; GPS; Wi-Fi; Bluetooth; and even a TV tuner on the Euro-spec version, and you have some idea what this phone is capable of. Pretty much everything, in other words…

But despite this wealth of features, you wouldn’t immediately notice upon picking up Nokia’s flagship smartphone that you’re holding about $895 in hardware. There’s no trace of polished metal around the edges (like the iPhone), no high-end plastics (like the HTC Diamond and Touch Pro), and no ultra-vibrant, high-resolution screen (like the Blackberry Bold). Instead, there’s just a 2.8-inch display with meager 320x240 resolution, framed in the same silver-flake plastic you might expect on a $30 Bluetooth headset. The only portion of the mobile phone’s construction that begins to belie its price tag is the back cover, which has a slick, scalloped pattern on dark blue, with a smooth, glassy finish.

The N96 is a slider phone, but not on the way you might expect. Shoving the screen upwards reveals the typical number pad (covering a very condensed area that’s only about an inch tall), while sliding it down reveals another ledge of multimedia keys up top: Fast forward, rewind, play, pause and stop. Fortunately, the sliding action defies the cheap look of case by feeling solid and trustworthy.

The face of the phone also has multimedia controls, clustered around a square directional pad where they’re easily accessible. You’ll additionally find the more typical answer and hang-up buttons, along with unlabelled shoulder buttons for making menu selections. More unique to the N96, there’s a dedicated application button for bringing you directly to the app-switching screen and a C that works as a catch-all backspace/clear button as well.

Up top, you’ll find the typical power and hold buttons, while the left-hand side has an easily accessible slot for a microSD card of up to 2GB. The bottom has a USB micro jack for data and a circular power jack that accepts a needle-like power cable. Both, unfortunately, are rather uncommon, and will ensure you won’t be borrowing cables from friends in a bind any time soon. The right edge offers a standard volume rocker as well as a dedicated camera button, and stereo speakers built into the shoulders – a rather unusual add-on to boot.

Nokia N96

Operating System

Nokia’s Symbian S60 operating system has drawn a cult-like following of power users, many of whom will pay drastic premiums and go far out of their way to import phones with the coveted OS. But much like other “Old Guard” platforms like Windows Mobile and PalmOS, it’s not clear whether this version of Symbian can truly compete with newcomer’s like Apples iPhone OS, Google Android, and the soon-to-come WebOS from Palm.

From a purely technical approach, it should be able to hold its own. We were able to connect to Wi-Fi, surf the Web, get directions on a map, and all the other day-to-day smartphone tasks you might accomplish with an iPhone or G1. But using the device just isn’t easy. In fact, it might even be one of the first phones whose manual we had to break out to discover how different features work, rather than just figuring it out via the usual process of hands-on trial and error.

One of our biggest pet peeves was Symbian’s incessant nagging for permission to use different connections. Seemingly every time we used a different program or feature, we had to click yes to accept that it would use a wireless LAN connection or cellular Internet to retrieve data. That may have been wise during the days of pay-per-byte Internet when this software was conceived, but it’s nothing more than a hassle in today’s all-you-can-download world.

Of course, there are several rewards as a tradeoff for suffering through Symbian’s complexity: Namely stability, speed and the depth of the features it offers. For instance, though it’s tougher to bring up maps, and slightly less intuitive to navigate them than using a multi-touch display like on the iPhone, you can manipulate them in additional ways, too. Want to drop the view down to a 3D perspective? Sure. Feel like switching into a GPS-like driving view? Got for it. Need to take a screenshot of the map? Not a problem. Want to copy and paste? Hey, the N96 has got you covered.

It all happens at about the same speed you can click, and we didn’t experience a single system crash or hang throughout the entire testing experience.

Overall though, existing Symbian users will likely find the N96’s hardware a perfect complement to their operating system of choice, but new users are unlikely to fall in love with its ease of use and graphical flare, as they might with next-gen OSes.