Nokia N95 review: Nokia’s crown jewel

Emails: no news

Nokia N95 can both receive and send out emails with attachments. It supports POP3 and IMAP4; emails are sent out using the protocol SMTP. Access to a mailbox is easy to set up as it is identical to the one applied in computers. All you need to do is connect to the Internet and insert your log-in name and password.

Emails • reading • setting up automatic receiving

From the settings you can select whether the phone should download entire emails including attachments or just email headers, or possibly something in between: the first X KB of each email. Besides, you can set the client to only download a certain number of all received emails. Regular mailbox checks are available too. You can even select whether only emails from local networks or, let’s say in roaming, should be downloaded; you can select the days, the hour (from – to) and the time interval (from 30 min. to 6 hours) of mailbox checks.

The email client is able to open HTML emails and attachments with no problems whatsoever. Thanks to the support of Office formats you will be even able to view attachments including Excel spreadsheets. The same array of options is applicable when emails are sent out too.

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Time organizer, Office, Internet

Pros: improved alarm clock • very well organized calendar • seamless synchronization • browser for Office and PDF documents • brilliant web browser

Cons: simple task manager • Office documents cannot be edited, only read

Here comes a miracle: Nokia has improved the alarm clock application of its Symbian smartphone! This innovation constitutes part of Feature Pack 1. The new alarm clock will wake you up at one and the same time either daily, or on working days only, or – if needed – on a particular day weekly. Besides, you can directly set up a number of such alarms. Apart from time and repetition, the application offers user-configurable text legends, so it can also be used as a substitute of the reminders in the calendar.

Good alarm clock in the end

In fact, I am probably one of the few users whom the old non-repeated alarm clock application suited perfectly as I usually wake up at different times or I simply do not set any alarm. The good news for people like me is that the old “one-time” alarm clock is still present in Nokia N95, but under a different name “Quick wake up”. The only configurable detail in it is the time.

The alarm clock will wake you up even if your phone is off. What’s more, it is so intelligent that once it has woken you up, it will ask you whether you want to switch on the entire phone.

The calendar offers month, week, and day views, of which one can be set up as a default one. The days featuring events in the month view are marked with a tiny nook. When you select this nook, a small window with event description appears in its top. The week view works in a similar way with the only difference that events are visualized in the form of oblong bars in a time axis. The daily view contains a chronological list of events.

 
Calendar and task manager

Nokia N95 offers four types of events: meeting, note, anniversary, and task. Once you have chosen the type you need, you can assign it a subject, a location, a deadline, and an alert time. The items in the calendar can be repeated daily, weekly, every two weeks, monthly, or every year. On the other hand, Nokia does not offer task repetition; there is no simple way to set up a reminder (for example, of a call you need to make and the number that has to be dialed), either.

The task manager is an integrated part of the calendar. Tasks can be assigned a priority and a reminder. Simple text notes without reminders are available as well, but these are located in a separate folder.

 
Notes

The calendar, the tasks, and the notes can all be synchronized with Microsoft Outlook. Details like deadline, subject, repetition, location, and even note are transferred without any problems

No modifications

In the menu with office functions you will also find a Voice recorder. Record length is no more limited to a mere minute. Nokia N95 provides an entire hour, instead. Record quality and storing directory (internal memory or memory card) are both controlled from the settings. Of course, Nokia has not forgotten to install a calculator, which works with roots and has enough memory, but does not manage any scientific functions.

 
Office functions menu

Other helpful applications are the unit converter and the barcode reader.

   
Browsing Office documents

Nokia N95 offers two other, far more useful viewers that manage reading Office and PDF documents. The application QuickOffice opens Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, which you can read and browse, but not edit, unfortunately. PDF files are opened by the mobile Symbian version of Adobe Reader. And of course, all documents in the above mentioned formats can be viewed in landscape mode.

Landscape view is available too

Another useful application is Zip. It helps opening zipped documents coming in email attachments as well as sending out zipped files straight from the phone.

Internet everywhere

The Internet browser installed in Nokia N95 is not new; we know it from former Nokia phones and it is brilliant, as always. It manages complicated websites including scripts, remembers form data, works with cookies and Java, and is extremely comfortable to use. There is cursor moving on the screen, which snaps to links. If you move the cursor too quickly, a small window with your exact location pops up automatically. When you move to the previous page, the browser shows you previews of the pages you have already visited.

Internet browser • fast browsing via navigation window

The browser works very fast in the presence of WI-Fi or HSDPA networks. If you use a GPRS connection, then you will surely appreciate its economic mode. Of course, Opera Mini uses the bandwidth even wiser.

Web pages can be viewed in landscape mode; the favorites can be saved into folders, which can be subsequently synchronized with a computer browser. Nokia PC Suite offers synchronization not only with Internet Explorer, but also with Firefox. This comes to indicate that the phone quite probably supports Opera too, but we cannot confirm this fact as we did not have Opera installed in our computer while we were testing the phone.

Landscape mode

Unlike its older “siblings” Nokia N95 is quite stable and has no problems with memory insufficiency. You may only face difficulties if you start browsing very complex websites. In such case you can be sure that the message „Memory is full, close some of the currently running applications“ will appear sooner or later.

Some of the older phones featuring Symbian 3rd edition had two Internet browsers: one was called Web and the other one – Services. The reason was that the Web browser would not open WAP pages, so another browser able do read them was necessary too. Nokia N95 only has one browser managing all above mentioned tasks.