Ok..first post. I had been looking for the ultimate cell phone with an integrated quality digital camera so that I wouldn't have to haul around an additional camera on business trips. The
N95 seemed to fit the bill, and I purchased one (
N95-3) through Amazon for $480.00USD.
I also was preparing for a three week vacation with my family to visit some of the beautiful National Parks in Colorado, Utah, and Arizona. So, another criteria was the ability to blog about our trip using geotagged photos. I only had a few days with the phone to work out the kinks in doing online posting from remote locations, but I was able to do it.
Also, another requirement was the ability to utilize different access methods to get my information out. The
N95-3 with 3G, WiFi, etc...again fit the bill.
From my perspective, the phone worked FLAWLESSLY. Now, there were some problems, but what phone has zero problems? The phone successfully allowed me to post continuously from many unique locations, even locations where I didn't expect to find any cell phone signals. Not only that, but with the number of WiFi access points all over the place, it was rare to be totally away from any access method for long.
I had one oddball reset that happened about two weeks into the trip, but I've read that others with the v20x firmware have experienced that before as well. Actually, it shutdown once on its own as well. But those were the only two occurrences like that.
I had some application failures, but it was third party stuff I was testing, and I didn't really care about them in the end anyhow.
So here are the basics by category:
PHONE: Phone worked great everywhere it had a signal, which nowadays is surprisingly almost everywhere...even in the middle of Zion National Park! I didn't have great signal there, but enough at times to get my blog updated with a tagged photo.
CAMERA: For what it is, I can't complain. I had a lot of comments from friends and family about the quality of the photos on the blog. I wish the JPEG compression were a little less, but it does what I wanted excellently. The camera never failed, and using Nokia's Location Tagger, I got geotagged photos without fail. I lost the screen protector I was using on the camera lens sometime into the trip, and was worried about scratching, but so far it has been fine. That is a good thing, as I was in some pretty dusty dessert conditions with fine grit and sand.
GPS: Not too bad really. If you use it a lot, the lock time on satellites is pretty good. If you move from one location to another that is quite a distance away from when you turned it off (like hundreds of miles), it does sometimes take a few minutes to lock back on, but overall was pretty good. Again, I used Location Tagger a lot, and it worked all the time. GPS applications themselves for navigation while on the road was pitiful however. Nokia Maps is useless to me. I had upgraded to 2.0 before I left, but I did not (will not) pay for the Navigation features. From what I understand, you only pay for "VOICE" navigations, but my experience proved that is not the case. You pay for both VOICE and NAVIGATION, which is no better really than just using Google Maps. Maybe I missed something here, so please enlighten me if you know the trick to getting navigation working. However, I would prefer something like Tom Tom or Garmin that has a database of maps I could store on a mem card, so there is less data traffic needed over the GPRS connection. If I wasn't paying for Unlimited data access, I would be afraid to see my bill for the last month!
OTHER: I may have missed some other things you guys would like to know about, so if you think of something, just ask me. However, one other thing I would like to mention is that I have NO PROTECTION on this phone whatsoever. I know...I know...I should have something. I just did not have the time to research the best solution for me before leaving on this trip. As such, I took special care to secure the phone to the best of my ability. The phone was in some pretty harsh environments over the last six weeks. Just before leaving for my trip west, I had a business trip to Hawaii, and the phone saw some beach time. I accidentally dropped it in the sand at the beach, but I blew the sand off, and it has been fine. Then, while on our trip west, it experienced some pretty intense heat. Zion National Park was having temps daily above 100F, and at one point I had left the phone in my BLACK truck! I can only imagine what the temp was in the truck, but when I opened the door it was like an oven in there. Also, the phone had been sitting in direct sunlight, and was extremely hot to the touch. It was still working. However, I got it out of the truck, and into the shade, and it continued to work just fine. So apparently the heat didn't hurt it at all. Except for the time in the truck driving from park to park, the phone never was in a cool environment. It experienced desert heat for over two weeks straight. Also, it was used on hikes a lot, got dirty a lot, got slightly wet at one point when I accidentally put it into the wet pocket of my swimming trunks, and still didn't complain.
Again, it has its faults, but overall is a WINNER for me. Sure...my friend has an iPhone 3G, and it is easy to drool over, but what can it do that my
N95 cannot? For me, the camera resolution was really the deciding factor between the iPhone and the
N95.
Oh, and battery life? It worked surprisingly well for me. I was easily able to take and upload photos to my blog, and still get a couple of days use out of the battery. Now, I made very few calls, and had disabled all email checking, so I'm sure that was the contributing factor. But in daily use with phone calls, I am very happy with the battery life.
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