One week with the N96 as the be all do all

David Gonzales over at Electronic Pulp has started his first week with the Nokia N96 as his only device for all multimedia and communication needs. Sadly I feel a rather bad review is on its way. I currently use the N96 as my primary device and I’m far from happy in many ways.

I won’t go into detail about the many things I dislike about the N96 right now but I did want to cover just a few. It should be noted that I am using the NAM (N96-3) variant of the device with the latest firmware release.

Firstly, when you pay close to $700 for any device you expect it to be fast and efficient. Sadly in the case of the N96 performance is not one of its strong points. I consider myself a very patient person and don’t tend to be overly obsessed with how fast something works as long as it works, but in the case of the N96 it tends to be neither at times. Moving around the device is not snappy as the N95 but I don’t mind that. The biggest trouble I have with performance is loading proper connections (Edge/3G/Wifi). The N96 is running on S60 3rd Edition FP2 which has some “improvements” with automatically connecting to the best source without user interaction. Not only is this painfully slow it doesn’t work at all at times and leaves you staring a useless application that can no longer process anything.

I admire Nokia’s attempt to make things easier with selecting connections because this is one of the most complained about issues with S60. However the implementation that is on the N96 is poor at best and is nothing more than a headache. I waste way too much time worrying if I am going to be able to connect to this or that to make it useful at all. Let us specify what connection we want for each and every application along with having a default, that if no other is specified, will always be the defualt. If they did this life would be good. No more prompting no more worrying.

The last topic I wanted to bring up was maturity of firmware and phone features. I find it very hard to believe the N96 was ever ready for prime time when they released it. Why? Because I feel it is still not ready. There are far too many issues with the device to charge what they do for it. Not only this but the software is just not there in the marketplace. I can’t tell you how many times a shiny new application comes out from Nokia and their supposedly flagship model, the N96, is not supported. This alone shows that the device was never ready for prime time and was put out way to early to hopefully get a few sales from gadget obsessed people like myself.

With all of this said I am looking forward to following up with David on his blog to see what his overall impressions are with the N96. If its great one week will feel like a day. However if he feels like I do one week will feel like 3 long months and he will have or hope to have something new in his hands ASAP.