Liza Lambert

During Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week, I had an opportunity to check it out live. And I have not changed my opinion – Nokia N96 is boring.

However, I had an epiphany while playing with Nokia N96. It turns out, that except for us geeky/blog newsy types, boring is actually very good.

When Nokia N95 hit the market, it had multiple bugs, was slow, used to crash, did not really felt right in the hands, the slider on it sucked, as did the battery life. We, early adopters, actually became beta testers for a new device and even shelled out some serious money for the privilege.

But all was forgiven in the name of all these cool gimmicks like GPS, 5mpx camera, Wi-Fi and others, that worked more often then not.

With Nokia N96 it’s a completely different story. You can feel that the N95 platform had a year to mature just by holding device in your hand.

Smooth shiny surface, really well implemented slider hinge, big clear screen, fast responses and small details like touch pad navigation or built-in quick stand for watching video, makes using Nokia N96 much more pleasant experience then a year old Nokia N95 in my pocket.

But, as they say a picture is worth a thousand words and a moving picture should be worth even more. So here’s a video demo of Nokia N96:

Other cool feature on Nokia N96 is 5 megapixel camera with geo tagging functionality (Via GPS). When enabled it automatically tags the images with the GPS location coordinates, which you can later use when sorting the pictures on your PC or online photo service.

Summary

Nokia N96 also comes with 16 GB of built-in flash memory and microSDHC memory card slot, where you can fit 8 GB memory card for a total of 24GB of storage.