Greatness within its grasp

INBOX:Nokia's new N96 mobile phone is an evolution, but not a revolution in quite the same way the N95 was, writes Mike Butcher

GEEKS LIKE me frequently joke about the kind of computing power you can carry around in your pocket these days. But when Nokia came out with the N95 mobile in early 2007 they decided to tell it like it was.

This, they said in adverts at the time, was "what computers have become". In other words, it was no longer a mobile phone, it was a computer. Strong words.

But at first, the N95 did not fulfil expectations. The first version, with 4GB on-board memory, was not a computer but, to use a technical term, a dog. The battery life was terrible. Run the GPS function and the 3G phone together and the phone's battery would commit suicide. But at least here was a vision of the future - a mobile which could do it all: inform you, find you and let you call the world.

Luckily the next version was a huge improvement. The black 8GB version came not just with double the memory, but improved battery life and a larger 2.8in screen. Pre-dating the iPhone, it was one of the first mobiles to feature HSDPA, Wi-Fi and GPS, a huge five-megapixel camera and it even had the accelerometer and lightsaber application, alas made rather more famous by the iPhone over a year later.

But 18 months later, the stakes are higher. Many new phones are sporting the same features of the first N95, so the N96 needs to be that much better. This time the strapline for the adverts for the N96 is "Face the task". But can it?

On first perusal this is a slider phone much like any other. At nearly 2cm thick it's not lost much bulk or weight from the N95 and only comes in one colour, black. The familiar N95 design, with a standard keypad at one end and a set of multimedia buttons at the other, is joined in the N96 by playback buttons around the navigation pad, squeezing Answer and End Call buttons into inconveniently smaller sizes.

The N96 has the same screen as the N95 8GB and the accelerometer only switches the screen to landscape while a kick-stand on the back enables movie-watching.

The software will be familiar to N95 users, though Nokia seems to have lost its nerve a little, scattering applications around and even including two media browsers.

But a welcome plus is the phone's ability to be customised with different icons, menu backgrounds, wallpaper and folders. And luckily Nokia is not so hide-bound by Apple's desire for clean lines, meaning there is a slot to add a 16GB microSD card to the existing 16GB on-board memory taking it to a whopping 32GB.

To fill it you can buy music from the Nokia Music Store and play it through the loud dual stereo speakers or the 3.5mm headphone jack and wireless headphones and speakers via Bluetooth A2DP.

Camera-wise the five-megapixel sensor with auto-focus and Carl Zeiss Optics remains, but is joined by a dual-LED to improve low-light performance. Web browsing is decent, as it usually is on Nokia phones. The GPS receiver and Nokia Maps 2.0 application has 2D, 3D, satellite and hybrid maps and it can even be used as an in-car navigator. As you'd expect this phone supports all kinds of e-mail including Exchange ActiveSync. It also packs Wi-Fi and HSDPA.

You can download games like Star Wars: The Force Unleashed from Nokia's N-Gage mobile gaming platform launched earlier this year, though it lacks the variety of dedicated portable games consoles like the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS so far.

The key difference with the N96, though, is the addition of support for digital TV broadcasts in the DVB-H format. But this is not much use in Ireland just yet, and there is only a subset of YouTube videos available.

And quite why a smartphone like this does not support threaded messaging - a feature that's standard on Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and iPhone - is a mystery.

With all its features you'd expect the N96 to have battery life to match, and better than the N95. However, the 950mAh lithium ion battery appears to be little improvement on the N95 8GB, if that's possible.

So, to conclude, the N96 is an evolution, not a revolution in quite the same way the N95 was, and it's hard to see why the N96 took such a long time to appear, because it's actually not hugely different from the N95 8GB. It's a disappointment from Nokia when greatness was within its grasp.