Recently mainly for geek value and the fact I was renewing my contact I
upgraded from a N81 to the new(ish) N96, now i really loved the N81, its was a
fast phone, had plenty of memory (8gig), EXCELLENT build quality, and worked
well as both a phone and a music player, when the N96 came out, it looked a no
brainer to upgrade as both the looks and layout were identical but with more
memory,features and a bigger screen
However…..
its not all roses, to save you all reading the boring stuff I’m just gona do
the normal pro’s and con’s list
Pros
Nice Screen: can watch an Anime with subtitle on it no prob
loud: it can drive a big pair of earphones at ear rupture level
Features: this does everything, I’m still looking for the “make toast” key
Space: loads, it comes with 16Gig and I’ve put in an additional 16Gig M2 card
with no probs
Nice and Open: This ‘aint no Iphone, you can do what you want on this devil.
Data Transfer: proper USB2 (the N81 only had a sub USB1 speed (400kbs)), and an
excellent Bloothtooth
Cons
SLOW: for some god forsaken reason its got a slower processor than the N95, and
the OS speed in comparison to the N81 sucks
Poor apps: both the built in music and movie player quite frankly are bobbins
(the movie player more than the music), i replaced the movie player with Core
Player and the music player with LCG JukeBox from lonely cat games (although i
keep the music player around when i want to play tracks by id3 tag rather than
file/folder layout), replacing these improved the speed no end.
Build Quality: this is objective but it does seem more fragile than the N81 but
that might be just me giving it a hard life.
Headphone socket: this shares the same problem that the Iphone does, in that
people that want a top of the range phone might not want a top of the range
pair of head phones , but in the N96’s case you cant open the phones
slider when a large pair of phones are plugged in and have to get one of those
IPhone extenders/adaptors.
Still crashes!!: this was supposed to not happen post the N95 but i crash mine
once a week at least, although the fact the alarms still work when its either
crashed or has been turned off is an amazing feature.
Large AAC files: This one is a strange un, large aac files (over an hour) that
used to play fine on the N81, report the wrong length (normally much much
shorter) and cut off when this time is reached, a slight work around to this is
to hide the music player just before the time is up, if you do this it carries
on playing (sort of like the music equivalent of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast
of Traal)
conclusion
In the first week i almost went back to the N81, but after i had ripped the
naff apps out (the music player also seems to leek memory and leaving it hidden
while using the media keys is normally what crashes my phone), i have started
to really like it, good hardware let down a bit by poor software.