Nokia's motivation in releasing the N96, it seems, is to supplant the N95--already an excellent phone in its own right--with something even better.

Released just last year, the 8 GB N95 won rapturous praise for its collection of multimedia entertainment features, all of which are back on the N96.

The new model can boast twice as much internal memory as its predecessor, but Nokia is hoping that the inclusion of DVB-H compatibility, allowing access to free-to-air TV signals on its new handset., will convince users to upgrade.

Nevertheless, whether or not Nokia can attract customers increasingly seduced by the touch screens offered by its competitors to this more traditional phone remains to be seen …

Refined styling

The N96's outer case remains relatively sober, and, although Nokia hasn't jumped on the bandwagon of ultra-trendy slimline handsets that seem to be in vogue in the mobile phone world, it has sensibly rounded off some of the N95's sharper edges.

At the same time, some of the unwieldy buttons on the earlier model have been slimmed down, leaving plenty of room for the bright 2.8 inch screen.

Little has changed in the interface, with the same double-slider mechanism giving access to different features.

When you slide the screen up, a regular numeric keypad appears, and four multimedia keys are activated (play/pause, stop, rewind and fast forward), and the interface remains in the regular portrait orientation.

Sliding the screen the other way, however, causes the interface to flip to landscape mode for watching videos, revealing another row of four multimedia keys which are otherwise hidden under the top of the screen.

Compared to the rest of the handset, which feels reasonably solid, this double-slider mechanism seems rather flimsy.


Another weak spot on the outside of the phone is the plastic support which encloses the camera lens: when you fold it out, you can stand the N96 on its side to watch films hands-free, but this ring-pull style fixture doesn't seem very sturdy.


On a more positive note, the inclusion of an SD card reader allows you to boost the N96's memory, which has in any case doubled in size to 16 GB.

As with the majority of Nokia's phones, flipping through the menus is a breeze, even if it is easy to get bogged down in too much detail--a few shortcuts to more common features would be welcome, for instance--and getting your head round it doesn't take any longer than any other similar phone.

Multimedia Features

You'll find all of the most common multimedia applications on the N96: photos, video, MP3 player, web browsing, GPS.

The camera takes decent photos, although it does better during the day at reproducing details than it does at night.

Videos suffer from a lack of contrast, and a not insignificant amount of noise. 

Nevertheless, unlike a lot of other mobile phones, the quality of sound recordings is good, and it's easy to make out the voices of subjects that have been filmed. 

If you slide the screen down, you can enjoy full-screen video, and there's no reason why you can't use it to watch a movie, as MPEG-4 and AVI are both supported, along with a particularly good WMV codec.

When you're listening to music, some tracks lack a little depth, but in general we were pleasantly surprised by the sound quality.

What's more, the inclusion of a regular mini-jack means that you can plug in your favorite pair of headphones without being restricted to those shipped by Nokia, which, as usual, do no justice to the sound quality actually produced by the N96.

Surfing the web is easy enough, even if it's not as easy and intuitive an experience as it is on Apple's iPhone.

In Nokia's favor, however, the N96 does support websites that use Flash, unlike the iPhone.

The GPS system still uses the house application Nokia Maps 2.0, which is workable enough, despite lacking some of the more powerful functionality that can be found on a dedicated satnav system.

Adding voice navigation to the GPS system requires a separate subscription.

Battery Life

Naturally, the abundance of features on the N96 and other modern phones places far more demands on their batteries than earlier generations of mobiles ever did; maintaining a diverse network of different wireless connections (3.5G, Blutetooth, WiFi …) eats up plenty of power, too.

The N96 is quite a robust phone in this regard, though, and can easily manage up to thirteen hours of audio playback.

When we tried it out, we found we needed to recharge it every two days or so.