Life with Me in the middle
Posts tagged n96
One week with the N96 as the be all do all
Feb 18th
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.
Why oh why do you hate me Mr. N96
Dec 29th
I have been using the N96 for a couple of weeks now and I am getting more frustrated every day. The firmware release that I am currently stuck with, 11.018, is driving me mad. It seems to crash at least once daily and I have to yank the back off pull the battery to get it back up again. This is not something I would ever expect from a high end Nokia N-series device. Frankly I cannot believe they ever put a software version out this bad.
My previous phone was a N95-3 which I loved in every way. I then moved up to a N95-4 (8GB) which was even better. You would think the next logical step for a media junkie like myself would be the N96 right? Wrong! This smartphone has the potential however its problems out weigh all of the positive things it brings to the table. I send a lot of text messages and sending on this revision of firmware is painful sometimes. I select a contact select create message and wait and wait. Even the things you would think it would excel at such as viewing photos, lags like a low end device. When you are moving through the photos it takes 1 to 2 seconds for the image to properly render. On either N95 this would be a second max with thousands of photos on the phones memory card.
While these things are annoying I could live with them knowing they would be fixed whenever they actually release the firmware update to us NAM N96 users. One thing I cannot live with is the huge problems with 3g and wifi connectivity. At times it takes 3 times or more to get the connection to work to check email or surf the web. Wifi umm yea right, your lucky if you can get it to work at all. I have almost given up trying to use wifi to download my podcast and watch videos.
As most of you know I’m a huge S60 advocate so this is painful to write but paying almost $700.00 for a phone and getting this is a real disappointment. I am going to continue to hold out for a couple more weeks if I can. I want to see if the firmware makes it out to us NAM users. Beyond that I’m giving up. Come on Nokia help me out here please.
Why the N96 went back into the box..
Dec 16th
I have been using the N96 for a couple of days now determining if this is the right phone for me. At first I didn’t like it all. I have been so used to the N95 form factor that something thinner felt kinda funny in my hands. After playing with it for a while though I did grow to appreciate not having a huge block in my pocket. Form factor aside the S60 feature pack on this phone was pretty impressive. They have added a lot of eye candy and everything seemed to work okay.
It sounds like a win win right? Well yes and no. I’m a pretty heavy user of Nokia Chat so of course I attempted to install this. Guess what? You got it, the N96 is not supported. Okay huge strike in my book but lets move on. My next step is to install Nokia Messaging (Email). I start through the guided installation process on the website. I select my phone and it ask me this funny question. Is your firmware version 12.0.0.0 or above? Well of course its not. I have been trying to install the latest firmware on my phone from the first minute I booted it up with no such luck. For some reason my phone, unlocked/unbranded, is not able to find the firmware upgrade that I’ve been yearning for. This was my last straw. I got the N95 back out and it has become my primary smartphone for the time being.
Has anybody been able to pull the firmware for their N96 (NAM) yet? If so how in the world did you get it?
Amazon Video on the N96
Dec 15th
I recently transferred my first Amazon mobile video to the N96 to see how it performs. My first impressions were actually not that great. I kept having a problem with the decoding of the video. The screen would turn into a green blob of blocks and then recover on random scenes. I know it wasn’t a problem with the video because I can watch it outside of the N96 and all is well. Overall the quality if great if they can work out these kinks.
I have only tested one video, “The Dark Knight”, however I would guess that the overall experience will be the same for all videos. I have not tried to rip anything and move it over yet but I’m guessing it will all work like a champ just like the N95-3. The question is, does the Amazon VOD (and mobile download) have a viable solution for movies on the go for us Nokia owners? Anybody else out there trying this?