Nokia N96 deals & review

Cementing Nokia’s N series of smartphones as its stable of feature-rich flagship mobile phones is the N96. It inherits the same dual slider form carried by its popular N95 smartphones but this time with updated features.

It has a more rounded set of corners and measures a larger but thinner 103 x 55 x 18 mm and weighing slightly lighter at 125g. It even comes in three body colors to choose from – black silver and quartz.

This time around, the Nokia N96 adds the ability to receive DVB-H television broadcast in countries supporting the mobile TV standard.

Key High End Features

Apart from its TV reception capability, the N96 is your usual quad band GSM (850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900) radio with class 32 GPRS/EDGE data speeds for up to 296 Kbps on the 2G network. It’s also a 3G phone on the dual band UMTS with HSDPA data connectivity speed of up to 3.2 Mbps for fast internet surfing and downloading.

Hotspot surfing is supported with its WiFi 802.11b/g with UPnP technology. Local high speed data connectivity gets Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP and microUSB 2.0 for wireless and wired data syncing, respectively. There’s SatNav support using its integrated GPS receiver with Assisted-GPS and preloaded Nokia Maps.

As a smartphone, the N96 runs the Symbian OS 9.3 with S60 3.2 UI powered by a dual ARM9 clocked at 264 MHz each. It comes preloaded with N-gage type games, a document reader for MS Office and PDF files as well as a WAP 2.0 HTML browser with RSS feed facility, Instant Messaging and Email client support, together with its TV broadcast apps on the DVB-H standard.

Multimedia gets a stereo FM radio with RDS and Visual Radio. You get the usual media playback support for decoding audio content in the MP3, WMA. WAV, RA, AAC and M4A formats and video content in the WMV, RV, MP4 and 3GP codecs.

There’s a mono speakerphone and a 3.5 mm stereo audio output jack for your wired high fidelity headphones. Alternatively, its A2DP profile over Bluetooth allows wireless stereo listening. Imaging is supported with a superb 5 megapixel digicam with autofocus, LED flash and Carl Zeiss optics. Video clips can be made with VGA resolution at 30fps frame rate. You also get a front-facing secondary VGA camera for 3G video calls.

All your images and videos get displayed on its gorgeous 2.8-inch TFT LCD screen with QVGA resolution and 16 million color depth. It comes with a gravity accelerometer for automatic portrait or landscape viewing according to handset orientation.

Its standout quality is its 16GB onboard memory that should be enough to house all your multimedia files. But if you need more, it has a microSD slot for an additional 16GB external memory. 

There’s also an internal 128 MB RAM for the OS system files as well as phonebook capacity for nearly unlimited contact entries.   Its 950 mAh Li-Ion battery when fully charged provides one of the shorted talk times in the market at 3.6 hours on 2G and 220 hours on standby. But you get 14 hours of continuous music playback time on a single charge. SAR EU is rated at 0.82 watts per kilo.