Nokia N95 - best of the best?

Sitting easily at the top of most peoples wish lists, the Nokia N95 seems to have captured consumers imagination like few gadgets before have managed. For the first time, Nokia engineers have managed to cram an almost obscene amount of functionality into a relatively compact, stylish package – and they’re flying off the shelves

This is in no small part due to the stylish look of the phone – it packs a 2.6-inch, 16-million-colour 320 x 240-pixel screen (the sharpest we’ve yet seen on a phone like this), a neat design, and reasonable size – it’s not much bigger than the N80. It is very slightly longer and wider, but compensates this by shaving a little on the depth. It’s no featherweight, granted, but for a fully-accessorised 3G phone so packed with features it’s pretty damn svelte.

The interface is typically nokia; slick, intuitive, and well thought out. A device with the functionality of the N95 could easily become unwieldy and intimidating in operation, so it is to Nokia’s credit that the N95 remains simple to use.

Perhaps the most intriguing part of the N95’s arsenal is its inbuilt GPS receiver, allowing the unit to run satellite navigation software and the like without the need for an external receiver. The N95 comes with Nokia’s “Maps” preloaded, and this seems to function fairly well. By default it uses a web connection to download maps on-the-fly according to the user’s location, but those conscious of their phone bill might be better off downloading the maps in advance from the Nokia site – full maps for England and Wales weighed in at under 200mb which is reasonable enough in these days of monster memory cards.

In use it performs well enough – the keypad must be left open, which is a minor inconvenience, and it seems to take an age for the GPS to find a fix initially. Signal strength is below what I’ve come to expect from my SIRFSTAR external receiver…but the difference is not major, and the trade off of not having to carry around yet another piece of equipment is certainly worth while.

The other gotcha is that, whilst maps is free to use the basic functionality, uses wanting voice direction for use as a navigation aid must pay a nokia subscription, but this isn’t too expensive - there is a £4.42 one-week option, a £5.44 30-day option, or a £47.68 option for those who sign up for three years.

Being a symbian smartphone, of course, the user is free to choose any one of a variety of 3rd party applications with which to use the GPS, from satellite navigation to sports training applications. TOMTOM works and runs smoothly on the N95, but as of yet does not support the built in GPS.