Nokia N96

Full Review

ng been in the market for months now, the Nokia N96’s price does not seem to have reduced. And its specs remain the same. The slider design with a dark finish has a good build quality. The 2.8-inch TFT screen is still displaying multimedia content with good clarity and enough brightness. Boasting the accelerometer, using the phone is a pleasant experience. But the build quality is not as good as we would have liked. Apart from that, it has an internal memory of 16GB plus a memory card slot for further expansion. Regular features like GPS with Nokia Maps, multimedia playback, N-Gage games support and 5MP camera using Carl Zeiss Lens are what the Nokia N96 has in store for us. Call quality is great on the Nokia N96 with enough volume on both the onboard speaker and in-call speaker. Reception quality is also great. It does not come with any business applications let alone the complete Office Suite that we expect (or rather is a must) to see in a phone of this price range. With the latest firmware update, we saw lesser lagging while opening gallery and switching between different applications.. The GPS fix did take quite sometime but thanks to Nokia Maps we were able to easily see our way through traffic in Bangalore. The N96 is quite an entertainer. The onboard speaker is very loud and was bettered only by the Samsung Omnia. Using its 3.5mm jack port, our Sennheiser in-ear phones delivered a rich and detailed sound which we only wished was a bit louder. FM reception is good but its much touted feature — the DVB-h — still did not work for us as there are no stations available. The browsing experience is also good though not as great as it was on the iPhone. The 5MP camera captured average images that lacked sharpness, with poor color reproduction and had some noise issues. Overall, considering the price tag of Rs. 34, 000, while other brands are asking for more, the Nokia N96 has more value for money with its decent feature set and performance.

Bottom Line

A rich set of multimedia features with excellent performance ensures the Nokia N96 a spot in our Top 5 superphones.