N96 From Nokia Is The N95 Replacement
If you thought the N95 was hot (and it is) you should see its younger sibling, the new N96. It has a sleeker physique and shine that is hard to look away from, alright, enough with the human/phone analogy, they didn't just update the appearance, this phone has some nice specs too.
It has Quad-Band GSM and HSDPA, here are the full deets: WCDMA/HSDPA 900/2100, EGSM 900, GSM/EGPRS 850/1800/1900 MHz. On top of that it has WiFi in the b/g flavors, Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR, GPS, aGPS, and some of them will even have DVB-H TV receivers.
There is a 5MP cam with optics from Carl Zeiss (as usual) and a dual LED flash/video light. It can capture video in MPEG-4 format at VGA resolutions at a speed of 30 frames per second. Both the videos and the still images can be geo-tagged thanks to the GPS and then stored on the N96's capacious 16GB of integrated storage space, and they were even kind enough to leave the microSD card slot in there so you could potentially double the integrated storage by adding a microSD card. You can also upload them to Flickr or one of Nokia's many new video/pictures services they are offering.
There is also a new version of Nokia Maps being announced, version 2.0, and that comes with the N96 as well. The new version offers multimedia city guides, user-downloadable maps, satellite images, and obviously navigation. But the navigation even has multiple functions with your choice of voice-directed car nav or pedestrian turn-by-turn directions.
There is a 2.8-inch QVGA display that you can watch MPEG-4, MPEG-4 with AVC/H.264, RealVideo, WMV9, Flash Lite 3.0, and Flash videos on, along with whatever can be streamed from various sources, or the DVB-H browser. Music wise you have your choice of formats including MP3, AAC, eAAC, eAAC+, and WMA which can be played from the integrated stereo speakers, the 3.5mm headphone jack, or via the A2DP Bluetooth profile that is included.
Obviously it is running S60 as its quite possibly one of the best mobile OS's around so it has all the nifty apps and such that are generally included as well as the N-Gage gaming system. It weighs 125 grams and has the dimensions of 103x55x18 millimeters. For battery life they are claiming it gets 220/150 minutes of use for GSM/3G and 220/200 hours of standby time for the same. Then there are the claims of 5 hours of video playback, 14 hours of audio, and 4 hours for TV playback.
I want one of these now, it's like a more attractive, more media centric version of the N95. If you, like me, want one of these, we'll have to wait until the 3rd quarter and then we'll have to come up with the $797 price tag this device will fetch, but honestly, other than a really upgraded iPhone, this is the only phone I've seen that I'd gladly pay that price for.
[via phonemag]