I upgraded from the N95 8Gig (also a seriously great phone) to this. I love both, but I prefer the N96 because it has a bigger memory plus the ability to expand. I added an 8Gig card SanDisk 8GB MicroSD Card ( SDSDQ 008G A11M)and have loaded lots of music and movies. In preparation for a trip I am loading other movies on additional cards so I can switch them out. Although watching on such as small screen takes some getting used to, this expansion feature is enough for me to favor this over the N95. The quality of videos is excellent, but I don't recommend you try to watch films with subtitles :-).

The only minus of this v. the N95 is that the N96 has a noticeably shorter battery life (only on standby and voice calls). I only had to charge my N95 every few days; this one needs it every day or two at the most.

The camera is excellent. In fact, it is the only camera I used on a recent trip and the still pictures and videos are as good as my very expensive (and very heavy) camera. Having only one thing to carry in my pocket without sacrificing picture quality was wonderful, (and the phone/camera was envied by all who saw it).

The phone has lots of useful features even if, like me, you don't subscribe to a data package. I use the phone to attach to wi-fi when out and check my e-mail, shop at Amazon, etc. This does not use the cell service and so there is no data charge.

I still haven't figured out the GPS system, but then again I haven't spent very much time on it. Not everything on these phones is intuitive and the written instruction book is lacking, but Nokia has an excellent web site with all the information I have needed to answer my questions.

This phone is really expensive, but it is worth it. Highly recommended for anyone with the desire for a great smart phone the ability to buy it.

For better or worse, it seems that smartphone reviews nowadays can't escape comparison with the iPhone, especially when that phone heavily touts its value as a consumer entertainment device. As it turns out, I'm an iPhone 3G owner (and former Windows Mobile owner) so this review is no different. I'll go ahead and spoil the ending to say that the N96 is no iPhone killer, but, refreshingly, I found that the N96 outclassed the iPhone's similar features in several areas. In fact, I'd say that while the Nokia N96 isn't for everyone, it positions itself as a strong media phone for those wanting an alternative to the Apple ecosystem.

On paper, the iPhone 3G and Nokia N96 are similar in many ways. Both have up to a 16 GB internal hard drive. Both have GPS. Both are designed to play musi, games and widescreen video downloaded from the internet. Both have an "app store", where you can purchase and download additional programs. Both have integrated WiFi and both have 3G connectivity (HSDPA).

The N96, however, is strong in areas where the iPhone is criticized for being weak. While the iPhone's camera is only 2 MP, the N96 boasts two cameras, one capable of video-calls and the other: an impressive 5 MP camera with a "flash" (really more of a close-range light) and lots of settings. The N96 has a removable battery, It has the capability for expanded storage with a Micro SD slot, it can send MMS messages and, most importantly, the phone is unlocked so you're not necessarily stuck with a single cellular provider!

The N96 hardware has some great components and features, as well. It comes with an impressive array of accessories that most phones sell separately (for a pretty penny). Included with the phone are an AC adapter, car charger, headphone/aux extension cord with built-in media controls, and even TV-out cables! The media and games are controlled by physical buttons which makes it easy to feel the buttons and navigate your music in the car without taking your eyes off the road. The built-in FM radio is great for local stations and, in my case, great for tuning into an FM-transmitted TV audio signal while jogging on the treadmill at my gym. The N96 also has the most impressive speakers I've heard on a portable device, producing enough volume to hurt my ears!

Unfortunately, there are also several drawbacks to the N96. The N96's 2.8 inch screen, while sufficient, is smaller than the iPhone's. The Nokia app store doesn't have quite the variety and impressiveness of Apple's store. You can transfer purchased movies to the N96 from services like Amazon Unbox, but you can't play Unbox movie rentals and the movie purchases you CAN transfer are restricted from playing via the included TV-out cables. The operating system can be difficult to use, especially because of the hardware's lack of touch screen, and lastly but most importantly, there's no keyboard, only a numeric keypad, so trying to compose emails and otherwise enter text is downright painful.

All in all, however, the N96 is a very powerful entertainment phone. I think most consumers will find the ease of use and elegance of the iPhone more appealing, but I'd recommend this phone to those wanting to watch movies and play games while at the same time preferring to get their media from services like Amazon Unbox rather than the iTunes store. It's also a reasonable buy for those who travel internationally with their smartphone and want to be able to change SIM cards rather than getting ripped off by international roaming or expensive international calling plans.

The price is a little steep, though not completely unusual for an high-end unlocked phone of this caliber, and overall I'd give it a weak four star rating: it's great, but far from perfect. The N97, expected in the US shortly after the first half of 2009 looks to have several improvements over the N96, but for those who want a high-end N-series phone sooner rather than later, the N96 will capably meet your needs.

I anxiously awaited the arrival of this Nokia N96. Its included features are enough to make anyone drool.

I am using the device with AT&T Wireless in the United States. I quickly found that your basic phone functions are more or less easy to use. Slide down the bottom keypad, and you're ready to dial a number.

However, the other features I was so excited to try on the device were somewhat less easy to use. The small indented power button on top of the device is even a bit confusing. You have to depress it for a fair amount of time. This can be a bit of a challenge, with large fingers.

The web browser is quite quick, and the silver navigation ring on the front of the phone made it relatively easy to move around webpages. However, somewhat less easy was figuring out how to connect it to the Internet. I added my home wifi network, which wasn't too difficult, but I imagine would be a challenge for some users. However, now, whenever I try to use any Internet based application or service, I have to select what connection I want: my home wifi, the mobile carrier's data network, etc. It doesn't just connect, you have to confirm and select information every-time you go to do something Want to listen to Internet radio, get ready to confirm you want to do that and that you want to connect to the Internet, and what connection you want to use. Want to use Nokia Maps? Get ready to select your Internet connection. It's really troubling.

The phone is also setup by default in metric measurements. I changed a setting from metric to imperial, but my maps still calculate everything based on kilometers rather than miles. This does not bother me, for the fact I'm very comfortable with metric measurements, but I imagine others might find this confusing and frustrating. Surely, there is setting to change this, but it is not obvious.

Turn by Turn Directions is a bright spot for the Nokia N96. Nokia will give you a 3 month trial of Turn by Turn Directions. Then all you need is a connection to the Internet, with your mobile provider, and you can get turn by turn directions from your current location to a destination of your choice. You can also search for businesses, restaraunts, or anything else you might be interested in driving to. Walking directions are also available. I would give the maps and turn by turn implementation on this phone a 4/5. It works quite nicely, once you get it running, though it is still a bit cumbersome.

The camera included with the N96 is another bright spot. For a mobile phone camera, it's one of the best. It is 5 megapixels, but more importantly it has a good camera lens that take solid pictures under good lighting. It has an autofocus as well. Perhaps even more impressive, the video you can shoot with the Nokia N96 is the best quality setting, is also very good. The video recording capability is one of the things I plan to use the N96 for the most.

Connect the N96 to your computer for some exciting options. On a Windows computer, you can use the Amazon Unbox service, to sync the mobile copies of your purchased TV shows. This can be good, if you need to watch a show on the go. It's also easy to use popular music applications (except iTunes obviously) and included software to sync your MP3 files to your phone, such as the ones you can purchase from the Amazon MP3 store. Videos from Amazon Unbox look quite good when viewed on the N96, and the sound from the Internal speaker and headphones were both impressive.

I also tried connecting the N96 to my Mac. Surprisingly, selecting the mass media option from the handset after connecting it via USB, even my Mac could sync with iPhoto the photos and videos I recorded on the phone! That is fantastic. Mac users can still use the N96 to pull the photos and videos they take. A nice feature.

3G - The N96 can connect to AT&T 3G network where available. This does allow faster map searching and internet browsing, though drains the battery somewhat quicker.

FM Radio - A surprising feature of the Nokia N96 is that when you connect standard headphones, you can listen to your local FM radio. It may sound like something of the past, but when your device has the capability it is more convenient than you might think.

Drawbacks - Again, a big drawback of the N96 is that it is not always easy to use. You'll spend several minutes, if not longer, the first time you try to do anything. Furthermore, without a dedicated QWERTY pad, typing messages, emails, or web addresses can be a challenge.

Overall, the Nokia N96 brings together a tremendous number of features. You have a solid phone camera, solid video recorder, multimedia player, music player, FM radio, calendar, web browser, 16 GB of included memory and more. However, there is a high learning factor, to use many of the features. Furthermore, with the power and capability of the phone, you sometimes find yourself wishing for a QWERTY keyboard, or a touch screen.

The N96 has some amazing capabilities, but for the several hundred dollars the device requires to purchase, I am left wondering how many people should pay that much money, for it. If you really believe it's the perfect phone for you, I would not discourage you. However, if you are not completely against getting a contract phone, an offering from Blackberry or the iPhone may be a simpler to use solution.

The new Nokia N96 phone reads like a powerhouse smartphone packed with features. It is a full color, unlocked GSM slider phone with a 5MP camera, stereo sound, music and video features. While it is a quad band world phone, here in the US it works on T-Moblie and AT&T networks (although AT&T is recommened for its faster 3G network). Let me start out by describing what you get. Nokia has packed quite a bit in the box. They include cables to hook your phone up to you TV to watch video, a car charger, a sync cable to sync your phone to your pc for updates, video, app and music downloads, battery, travel charger, a remote that hooks into the phone along with earbuds that hook into the remote, (no you can't use the earbuds without the remote and you cannot hook alternate headsets into the phone or the remote),an invitation to use the OVI service (an online backup service with tiered features to backup your phone), a User Guide, Get Started Guide, the Nokia PC Suite CD, an NGage free game offer, warranty info and of course the phone.

Now for the phone. It is a beautiful, full color, lightweight device that promises much, but delivers less. Since this is a GSM phone, after calling to switch service, you only need to add your SIM card to start using it. The battery was partially charged out of the box, so it did not take long to charge. Despite what I have read from other reviews, I had no problems adding contacts from my SIM card to the phone. Since this phone IS NOT a touch screen, everything is menu driven. Nokia did not do a good job of letting you know where all the menus are. While a User Guide is included, the full version of how to use the phone is included in the online version of the guide that can be found at the Nokia product page. The buttons on this phone do not stand out as much as I would like. The call and end keys are on opposite sides, but are not as prominent as they should be. The Power key is on top and it takes a few minutes to turn it on. There are "media keys" that work for video or music playback that surround the larger scroll key. The scroll key is used to navigate the various menus, with the usual Nokia context sensitive Selection keys above the Call and End keys. The scroll key is very sensitive, I kept hitting selections that I did not want and it is also used for navigating web pages. There is a menu key that is usefull and a multimedia key which isn't that helpful. The display is beautiful and call quality is excellent. You slide the main section up to bring up the keyboard and number pad. This phone should have had a qwerty keyboard, as the typing on the keypad is time consuming pressing keys until you come to the one yo need. This is also even more frustrating for the Internet. While the display is very clear, the browser is only a WAP mobile browser, not the full Internet browser that an iPhone or iPod Touch would have. Using the scroll key to move a too small arrow around is a pain. While this phone offers YouTube, the Internet video quality is very spotty. The stereo sound in 3D is very clear and you do not need a headset to listen. This phone is one of the few compatible with the Amazon UnBox service. To try out the service, I installed the Nokia PC suite. It installled a software updater, Video suite manager, photo app, PC suite app, and a Map loader for the GPS function. The installation of the apps was fast, though starting the PC Suite app took a very long time. The Amazon UnBox service is a video on demand portable player to watch video on you PC or mobile device. It was very easy to download the player and install it. Amazon has a nice selection of videos and I downloaded a Stargate SG-1 episode to view on my phone. Purchasing was fast and easy although downloading took a very long time because of the extra option for portable files. The UnBox player interface is nice, but I had a difficult time trying to transfer the files to the phone. The help files say that you can just copy files to the phone, but you actually transfer the files by clicking play. After finally getting the files to transfer to the phone, I was able to watch the video. The video playback on the phone for the Amazon purchase was clear and of excellent quality. Playback on the phone is in the widescreen format. It will play in both portrait and landscape mode, although queing up takes a while unlike an iPod or iPhone. You can slide the main phone the other way to show the video keys in landscape mode. The main 5MP camera with the Carl Zeiss lens is outstanding, the best camera I have seen on a phone so far. It has a flash and is located on the back. There is also a lower resolution camera on the front. Both can capture images and video. Photos look fantastic. The N96 is also supposed to broadcast TV signals through the LIVE TV service, but like most of the Nokia service options, it is not available in the US. Neither is the Nokia Music Store and the Nokia Maps turn by turn service. The phone will play music via the Windows Media Player (no Apple iTunes formats) and podcasts. It also has an FM radio and Internet radio playback capability. The radio feature will only play with the remote and headset attached. You cannot listen to the radio without the attachments, another boneheaded manuever by Nokia. The Maps feature, which is the GPS function to me was useless. After the app opens, you see a 3D image of the planet. You have to install the Maps software before the actual street level option will work and as I mentioned before, the turn by turn doesn't work in the US. My iPod Touch handles GPS faster and easier than this. The N96 is also supposed to be Bluetooth compatible, but I could not get it to discover my Bluetooth headset despite numerous attempts.

This phone has a lot of quirks. While it does turn on fairly quickly and you can make calls quickly, Using many of the features means responding to a number of silly requests such as "go on Internet now?" after selecting the web option. I personally prefer touch screen phones because it is much easier to navigate than having to drill down through numerous menus. Some shortcut options are available, but not for a lot of features. I did not try the OVI service, since I already use a wonderful service called Dashwire to backup my phone. The N96 does have a large 16 GB storage with a memory card addition available, it does leave a lot to be desired. This phone is better engineered for the overseas market rather than the US. It would a good option for those who use the Windows Media audio files for music and radio and camera and video fans. It is a good effort, but falls short, especially for the high price.

I was excited to try this phone out as I have been using Windows Mobile devices for awhile (currently using the AT&T Tilt) and never been completely satisfied with their performance. A 16 gig phone geared for music and video looked right up my alley. Having used this phone for several days and tried as many features as possible, I'm not nearly as enamored with it as I hoped. For a $600 phone, I expected something far more polished. This seems to have been rushed into production and has quite a few bugs and problems. Let's run down the good stuff first.

PROS:

- Light, compact form factor. Considerably lighter than my Tilt.

- 16 gig of memory. Excellent amount of included space, and can take a microSD card for even more media files.

- Beautiful screen. Video is sharp and colorful, although it could be a bit brighter. But hard to complain with the quality of the picture. See below though for more comments on video playback. It also is much more visible in sunlight than my Tilt is.

- 5 gig camera with flash and video capability. I debated whether to include this under the "pros" as I didn't find the quality of the images produced by the camera all that great, particularly indoors. But having a flash and being able to record video with it is still at least better than not having it at all.

- Excellent sound quality and nice loud speakers. Includes two speakers for "sort-of" stereo playback. This phone can really produce some serious volume, I was quite impressed. Granted, the sound quality out of the speakers is not going to blow anyone away. But it's pretty good regardless. And make sure you turn the volume down before using the headphones, it will totally blast you away! If you regularly try to listen to music in noisy situations where volume is crucial, you will know how important this can be.

- Excellent multimedia features included. FM radio, internet radio, podcasts, etc. Most of these I could do on my WM phone, but great to have them included for seamless integration right on the phone.

- Good included accessories. Includes a remote with speakerphone, car charger, TV out cables, free game, etc. Better package overall than most phones.

Now for my fairly long list of negatives.

CONS:

- Lack of fullsize keyboard and/or touchscreen. I was surprised to see there was no touchscreen on this phone, that makes it really hard to compete with other smartphones in the same class like the iPhone and any Windows Mobile phone. With my Tilt, I not only have a full QWERTY keyboard (which granted, is not the greatest way to enter text for most people, but nice for things like passwords and WEP keys) you can use a wide variety of entry methods that work with the touchscreen. I personally use ones like Fitaly and Touchpad which can give good speed and yet still easily handle non-standard text at any time. One of the things I particularly find annoying with phones like this that use T9 is that you often have to turn it on and off which requires going to the menu. Likewise with the multi-key entry of letters and numbers, you have to constantly switch back and forth, which takes far longer on this phone than just about any other smartphone I've used. It's incredibly tedious and if you use your phone as a PDA or anything other than quick texting, you should probably look at better options.

- Problems using Wifi versus AT&T data plans. I personally use pay-as-you-go currently as I don't need to pay for monthly cell phone service and almost always have access to Wifi networks. With my Tilt, it's a simple matter of a one-time configuration of the phone for any Wifi network and it will use that automatically versus accessing the AT&T data network. This phone just would not cooperate with that. It often would switch over and use the data plan and charge me no matter how I configured it, even going into the settings and making my Wifi the default. Worse, you would have to do this *every* time you access a new Wifi network, setting it up as a default and then switching it back, and even then, it seems to randomly hit the data network and charge me for usage without warning. And to make it even more annoying, just about every time it needs to access the internet, it has to ask me what network to use, the Wifi or AT&T. Why bother setting a default (and configuring it for automatic) if it's not going to just use it?? It's almost like the phone is trying to get you to use the paid data plan whether you have access to Wifi or not. Just about everything else on this phone I can kind of deal with, or work around, but this is so frustrating for me and COSTS ME MONEY that it's a total dealbreaker. So if you want to use Wifi as your primary data access network, and not pay the significant cost of a monthly data plan, you will probably want to use a different phone.

- Bare-bones email and web applications. The email and web apps that came with the phone didn't do much for me. Emails with HTML were not properly formatted at all, and the options for handling email as well were very limited compared to what I am used to. When I tried to adjust my settings, it wiped out my custom POP settings and I had to enter them all over again (which due to the lack of keyboard is particularly annoying). The web browser was not quite as bad, but navigating the pages without a touchscreen is slow and tedious and it kept popping up the "overall" page view when it was inconvenient. The back button brings up little thumbnails of the pages but for some reason they were often blank and kept skipping the actual page I wanted to get back to. I was easily able to load on the free Opera Mini browser however, which gave me a far better experience. If you use a smartphone, I highly recommend grabbing a copy of it. I've not yet found a free email replacement, I'd probably have to pay to get an email application that just does the basics that I would have liked to come with the device.

- While there's certainly plenty of games on Symbian and for N-Gage, the library of applications is a bit more limited. Also just the fact that it doesn't use a touchscreen makes game play often more limiting and somewhat more tedious as it relies totally on keystrokes, particularly the types of games I prefer (card games, adventure games, etc.) Still, the games offered were decent enough and the graphics top-notch for a mobile phone, and I do notice more places offering Symbian versions of their software. Both my Hava player and Roboform mobile apps had versions that ran okay on the N96 (although not flawless).

- Performance issues. My main hope was that this device would be zippier and less prone to locking up than the Tilt. Unfortunately this was not the case. The processor is downgraded from the previous N95 model, most likely done to allow them to also downgrade the battery as well but I can't say if the problems I saw are a result of this or typical for Symbian phones. While the video was sharp and beautiful to look at, I still experienced pauses and skips...particularly with the sample videos included! Almost all of the ones included with the phone did not play smoothly all the way through. I had better luck with some small videos that I synced to the device and a couple TV episodes that I downloaded from Amazon Unbox. While they did not always play perfectly, they were at least watchable for 95% of the time. The phone itself also often temporarily pauses and/or freezes and a few times locked up on me completely. Unlike the Tilt which has a reset option, I could not figure out how to unlock this phone when it froze other than to remove the back and pull the battery out. Very annoying.

- Camera image quality. It's important when evaluating cameras to realize that megapixels means little about quality. So getting 5 MP with the phone means mostly that the images it takes will just take up more space on the phone. They certainly aren't of a quality that I would be interested in printing them out which is where the 5 MP would be of any use. They are of similar quality to most cellphones...which means only good for snapshots when you have nothing better on-hand. And indoors in anything other than very bright light, they were definitely worse than what my Tilt is able to take, even though the camera includes a flash.

- Battery life. Barely passable, no better than my Tilt which was equally a battery hog. You definitely need to charge it every night and if you use your phone much, you may find you need to charge it during the day as well.

- Voice control. This is one of those phones that you don't really train, it just recognizes the names you speak and picks the default phone. Also some basic application control. This type of VR can be problematic if you have people with similar names and I just much prefer training my own names and commands as I can with the software on WM phones. And of course, there's nothing in the manual about how to even use this feature.

- Live TV. Touted as a feature, but won't work for most people due to very limited coverage right now. You're probably much better off just getting a Slingbox or Hava which will work with a wide range of phones these days, including this one.

- Non-standard USB cable. May seem like a small nit, but things like this just annoy me. Why not use a standard mini-USB cable, which most people have multiple ones of, and also a USB cable that will simultaneous charge the device? It's really annoying when you are syncing the device, moving videos, etc. and it runs out of juice. Using this new micro USB cable means I'll need to buy another one for travel....and probably another cable for charging in different places.

- GPS. I only tested the GPS briefly as this was another area where it seemed to insist on using the data plan rather than Wifi. But I just don't see the benefit in using a GPS on such a small screen and paying monthly fees for it, when you can buy dedicated GPS units for as little as $100 these days that are larger and easier to read while driving, and with much better features. This GPS didn't work nearly as well as my simple Garmin unit and didn't even compare with running TomTom on my Tilt which I don't pay any fee to use (other than the purchase cost of the software).

- No case or screen protector. For the price, some kind of cheap case would be nice. The device comes with a plastic skin covering the front and back that would do nicely as a screen protector, but for some reason, they plastered a big "NOKIA" over the front so it can't be used. The screen and phone itself really shows fingerprints and smudges pretty readily so a screen protector would have been highly appreciated.

- Nokia PC Suite issues. I didn't have too much trouble syncing my Outlook contacts, but had various issues with other parts of the PC Suite. Forget using the music application, for some reason it didn't read 99% of the tags in my MP3s, so had to use Media Player to sync music to the device. The video manager as well did not work very well for me. It handled small videos okay, but as soon as it got to anything with length, it locked up on me. Took me several tries to convert videos of more than 100 meg in size. I want to try and do some conversions myself and see what videos it really can handle, as I have other mobile video conversion software that does a good job, but I know already it doesn't seem to handle Divx video which is a shame.

- Bare bones user manual. The manuals included cover the basics, but you won't find much help in them if you need more than just "getting started" information. For instance, I was trying to figure out where I turn on T9 predictive text, but there's absolutely no information in the manual on text entry whatsoever. I went to the Nokia site to see if the support section had a better manual to download, but nope. You better be good at figuring stuff out on your own to use this phone (and yes, I did figure out where the T9 setting was).

- Other issues. I seem to just run into random problems with this phone. YouTube videos for instance would not play at all, regardless of which browser I used. It doesn't seem to like most of my album art in the music player, and does not always play smoothly if playing in the background while doing other activities on the phone (web browsing for instance). The microSD slot is harder than most to get the card in and out of. The build quality is very plastic, cheap feeling. And there are just some things that make it obvious it was kind of rushed to market. For instance, there's a settings screen for a "scroll wheel" even though the phone doesn't even have one! Would be nice if it did, but to have settings in there for something that does not even exist on it, makes me wonder how much testing they really gave this phone before releasing.

To summarize, this is a phone I really wanted to like. It's got huge potential as a portable media device and phone, but there are just too many problem areas to recommend it over other devices in the same price range.