We check out the big daddy of Nokia's Nseries devices, the 16GB N96, now available with North American 3G support. Does it top our favorite smaller Ns? Find out in our Nokia N96 review.
Review summary of the Nokia N96:
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 Deciding whether to buy the Nokia N96 really comes down to the value proposition. It's a solid phone, and it fits nicely in the Nseries lineup, but this phone doesn't measure up against the superior Nokia N85, a phone that offers improved performance and better features for 1/3 less cash. The Nokia N96 has good call quality and solid multimedia performance, but Nseries fans can do better. Compared to other multimedia smartphones, the Nokia N96 packs all the features you're craving, but wasn't able to deliver in terms of speed or reliability. The battery life was abysmal, the keyboard was a pain to use and the design overall, inside and out, seemed uninspired. Even this phone's standout features, like Flash support in the Web browser, were so poor that we can't consider them a selling point. This may have been a nice phone when it was launched, but since then Nokia has done much better. Release: October 2008. Price: $500.
Pros: Large screen. Good sound quality, for music as well as phone calls.
Cons: Low battery life. Underpowered compared to less expensive Nseries alternatives.
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Full Nokia N96 Review:
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Design – Good
The Nokia N96 is a slightly refined variation on the now-familiar Nseries theme, begun with the Nokia N95 a few years ago. Though its packed with features, the Nokia N96 is something of a brick, a blocky-looking device with mess of buttons thrown onto the front. Beneath the large, crisp, 2.8-inch screen, the biggest of the bunch for current Nseries phones, We found the familiar assortment of Send / End keys, plus a basic menu key, a multimedia menu key and 2 soft keys. When the phone comes to life, an assortment of multimedia playback keys appear around the 4-way button. These seemed unnecessary, as the N96 is also a dual-slide phone, so if you open the device against the keypad, you'll get a vertical row of playback keys. We like having so many options, but as our fingers ventured from the 4-way button, it was difficult to press precisely on the required spot, especially for those soft keys up top, since each key was given so little room. This became a theme of the device, as other buttons and keys gave us trouble as well, including the camera button on the side and the numeric keypad beneath. Buttons were hard to press and slow to react.
The interface on the Nokia N96 is pure Symbian S60, and new units will ship with the feature pack 2, which offers a few visual enhancements, but nothing significant. Symbian S60 is starting to wear on us as an OS, much like Windows XP wears on us. The phone constantly asked permission for basic tasks. We had to select the proper network connection multiple times in a single Web session, and the phone had trouble remembering some of our settings. Even at its best, Symbian S60 looks its age, and its older than the best new interface designs on the market. For multimedia fans, there is a basic media menu accessible by a dedicate key on the phone's face, but even this seemed like a jumble of lists on window panes, and wasn't very inspired. When Nokia gets around to redesigning the Nseries interface, fun should be the buzzword of the day.
Calling – Very Good
Our Nokia N96 test unit used AT&T's 3G frequencies for calling and data. In our tests around the greater Dallas metro area, we were pleased with the results. Calls sounded very good over AT&T's HSDPA network. Reception was also solid, with a full complement of signal bars whenever we checked. Battery life didn't fare so well. Nokia promises a little more than 2.5 hours, and with the middling battery capacity, that's about what we got. Sure, HSDPA networks tend to drain batteries quicker, but we've seen much better battery life on the Nokia N85, which uses a larger battery combined with some power saving technology to provide about 5 hours of use. With e-mail continually synchronizing with our server, we had to charge the Nokia N96 in the middle of a busy day or it would die before we left work.
For calling features, the Nokia N96 was a mixed bag, like other Nokia Nseries phones we've used. We liked being able to synchronize the phone with our Exchange contacts, thanks to Nokia's Mail for Exchange software, a free download to the device. Unfortunately, voice dialing was a bust on this phone, just as it was on the N85. It almost always failed to recognize our commands, only once finding the right name in our battery of 10 tries. The speakerphone was good, but considering the two speakers place on the side of the phone, we expected better. Bluetooth sync worked nicely.
Messaging – Good
For messaging, the Nokia N96 doesn't come with many options preloaded, but there are some interesting apps available for download right from the phone's Download menu. Simple text messaging comes pre-loaded, but it was a pretty disappointing app with no threaded messaging ability to show all the messages in a conversation at once. There is a basic e-mail client on board with plenty of options to set up your own POP or IMAP account, but we downloaded Nokia's Mail for Exchange instead, which let us keep tabs on our Microsoft Exchange account. We couldn't delve into our subfolders, but messages in our inbox were accessible. For instant messaging, we downloaded a promising looking app from Nimbuzz. This purported to let us keep in touch with numerous accounts at once, including our Gtalk, Facebook and Twitter accounts, as well as the standard AOL and Yahoo services. Unfortunately, the Nimbuzz app didn't work well. It couldn't log onto our Facebook account, and had some trouble sending messages through other services. Sometimes a message would simply get swallowed by the ether. It's a great concept, one we've been hoping to see for a while, so with some improvement, this could be a useful app.
The keypad on the Nokia N96 is probably our least favorite of all the high-end Nseries devices. Though the phone is a chunky brick of a device, the keypad gets surprisingly little room. The columns are nice and wide, but the rows are so short that typing was difficult. The keys were too slick with no division between the columns. It's a shame that Nokia includes 2 sets of multimedia playback keys, but not a single good set of keys for messaging.
Multimedia – Very Good
As a multimedia device, the Nokia N96 keeps up with the rest of the Nseries family. The interface on the music and video players could use a serious overhaul, but there's no arguing with the phone's capabilities. We synchronized some tunes using the Nokia PC Suite, then dragged some to the phone in mass storage mode, and the N96 found all of our tracks with no trouble. Music playback was very good. The phone has a nice set of stereo speakers on the side, and these were adequate for small room listening. What's more, the Nokia N96 is a dual-slider, so if you open the phone the other way, you get a vertical set of playback controls. These weren't entirely useful or necessary to us, but opening the phone this way did trigger an orientation switch from portrait to landscape mode. There is a built-in accelerometer, but most apps didn't seem to recognize when we had tilted the phone, so we were constantly opening the second slide to switch orientation.
Video playback on the device was very good, but we've seen better on an Nseries phone, especially on the Nokia N85. Our Nokia N96 review unit chewed up all the MP4 we threw at it, and had no trouble resizing VGA videos to fit the smaller display resolution. Videos looked good on the phone's large screen, but we still saw some pixelation during some videos. Of course, U.S. buyers won't get one of the key advantages of the Nokia N96 European version, which is support for DVB-H TV broadcasts. Still, the phone did a fine job with preloaded content.
The Nokia N96 is a capable multimedia device in terms of hardware, as well. The phone features a 3.5mm headphone jack, so we could use our favorite earbuds, and it's placed smack in the center of the phone right on top, which let the device sit naturally in our pockets. If you don't want to use headphones, the Nokia N85 also uses stereo Bluetooth for wireless connections. The N85 comes with an FM transmitter, but the N96 lacks this option. Instead, the phone packs a whopping 16GB of internal storage, and Nokia has also generously included a microSDHC slot (hear that, Apple?), which means you can jump to a full 24GB of storage with an 8GB microSDHC card.
Web browsing – Very Good
Nokia Nseries devices have always included one of the best Web browsers on the phone market, and the Nokia N96 was no exception. Browsing the Web was a speedy experience over AT&T's fast HSDPA networks. When we wanted to do some serious downloading, for the recent over-the-air software update, for instance, we switched to Wi-Fi. This wasn't a flawless experience, and a couple times the phone had trouble finding our unlocked home Wi-Fi network, but usually this worked well. Once Web pages were loaded, the browser handled them with aplomb. Layout was nearly flawless in every page we checked, and the browser scrolled through long pages very quickly, using the app's mini map as a guide. Going back and forth through the browser history was also a cinch with the page snapshots that the browser keeps in memory. Again, typing on the keypad caused some initial headaches, but once we had all of our bookmarks loaded, we were very pleased with the experience. We also think the Nokia N96 would benefit from a Navi Wheel like we found on the Nokia N85, which allowed us to scroll smoothly through pages by circling the center button.
The Nokia N96 Mini Map browser can supposedly support Flash Lite 3.0, but we had trouble getting any videos to play properly. We tried navigating to YouTube to watch streaming content, but most videos flat out refused to load. When we finally found a low-quality clip that would play, it was reduced to a framerate that was so low as to be unwatchable, more of a slideshow than a streaming video. This phone simply lacks the power to play Flash videos properly.
Camera – Very Good
Nokia's recent volley of Nseries devices, with their 5-megapixel, Carl Zeiss branded, auto focus lenses, have really changed our opinions about what a cameraphone can accomplish. Pictures taken with the Nokia N96 were mostly top notch, especially pics we took outdoors on a sunny day. Low light pics suffered a bit, and the dual-LED flash managed to light our subjects, but also cast them in a purplish glow. Still, some of the close up shots and landscape pics we took with the N96 were ready for the printshop.
We had a good experience with video on the N96 as well. Despite Nokia's official specs, the N96 does in fact shoot VGA-resolution video at 30fps, resulting in large, smooth movies that look very good. They weren't up to par with low-end camcorders we've tested, but they could certainly hold their own against a Flip miniature camcorder or similar device.
Our biggest complaint has to do with the two-stage shutter button on the side of the phone. It seemed unresponsive in our tests. The Nokia N96 took a long time to turn on the camera app, and then took a long time to focus each shot. Check out our image samples below for the best shots taken during our test run.
Snowy Town Square
Light Pole and Tree Branches at sunset
Solar Flare and Wire Reindeer
Rusted Locks on Wood
Self Portrait
Puffball Flower Close Up
Wildflower Close Up
Cholmondeley lit by Dual LED Flash
GPS navigation – Very Good
The Nokia N96 comes equipped with Nokia Maps, which can be a powerful navigation tool, but seemed to lag quite a bit on this phone. Whether it was an underpowered processor or poor GPS reception, the phone took more than 10 minutes to figure out that we had moved from New Jersey to Dallas, Texas. It couldn't find our destination in it search, and had trouble redrawing maps in time as we drove down the highway. We had a better experience using the same app on the Nokia N85, so we're going to blame the phone for our troubles here.
Value – Mediocre
Compared to other unlocked Nseries devices, the Nokia N96 just doesn't add up. While online retailers like Amazon are selling this phone for $500, the Nokia N85 comes in far cheaper at about $330. Though the latter phone lacks the storage capacity of the N96, and uses a screen that is a fraction smaller, it's a much better device all around, with an improved OLED screen and a more responsive feel. Nokia's numeric naming conventions aside, we'd easily pick the N85 over this device.
Price and availability
The Nokia N96 is available now unlocked from online retailers like Amazon for around $500.
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