The Zana Zen

Well… I just recently bought the Nokia N95 cellular phone and I wanted to share with you my thoughts about it. This is not a gadget blog and I don’t usually do any kind of reviews.

I presume that you already know all its featuers, I’m not going to discuss that but rather just my own experience with it. In general, it is a good phone, it has a lot of useful applications but it also has some problems, these are really annoying:

• The battery really runs out quickly, especially if you are taking pictures or videos with the 5 mega pixel camera, I mean, after 2 hours the battery will be dead, so it’s no so wise to depend on the N95 to be your personal camera as well.
• It has some problems with the RAM. From time to time, when I’m running more than one application concurrently, I get a message that there isn’t enough RAM and I have to close other applications for it to continue functioning properly. And I can say for sure that I’m not running so many applications concurrently. For instance, You can’t take a picture while the browser is running, that’s a really significant shortcoming IMO, I paid a lot of money for this phone and I didn’t expect Nokia to save manufacturing costs and reduce it’s memroy size.
• The GPS feature is great, worked really nice in NY. But I live in Israel and there aren’t any available maps for this region, so it was really disappointing for me.
• Email – The N95 only supports IMAP and POP3. Exchange is out of the question, the best application that Nokia has to offer, Mail for exchange, is not supported on this phone – An alternative costs about $50 (Dataviz RoadSync).

I guess that some of the problems will be solved in the future by Nokia (GPS maps in Israel, support for Exchange mail), but I don’t see how the RAM and battery problems are going to be solved.

But you know what? Even though I’m complaining like a bitch here, I’m really glad about my purchase. It is cool, and just the 3D-ringtone feature was worth it. I’m talking about the feature where the ringtone is playing with a changing balance between the left and right speakers. It produces a 3D surround effect which really caused a smeared smile to appear on my face, then it turned to laughter and then to an unexplained comfort feeling that accompanied me for the whole day long.

Well, I’m done. Here is your chance to have second thoughts, think about these things before you buy it. For me, it was worth it after all.