The Nokia N95, such a hyped up handset from the worlds leading mobile handset manufacturer. I bought the N95 when it first came out, couldn't wait to get my hands on it. Satellie navigation i thought on a phone...wow.

I eargerly assembled the handset and plugged it into the wall to charge, with a view of leaving it there for at least 16 hours (full battery charge cycle). This will aid the battery in holding 100% of its capacity during charging cycles. Always do this with a new phone, you'll thank yourself for doing it when your battery lasts that little bit much longer during your ownership of it.

It took ages to boot up. By the time it was ready for use it had been at least a 3 minutes. At first i thought "it's broken already?" as it seemed to be stuck on the white nokia logo screen. It did eventually spring into life and a nice welcome screen asking me about tutorials and would i like to watch some video of how to operate then handset. I noticed at this point that the light omitted from the screen was visable through the side of the handset, the screen it self is sandwiched between an upper and lower plate of plastic, the gap between them both was where the light was escaping. This to me looked terrible and further added to my disappointment of the N95, cheap and tacky build quality which for the price of handset is really unacceptable. The screen itself is really nice, it's clear, has plenty of colour range and is nice and bright.

Nokia Maps software (preloaded on the N95) comes with a three-day free trial licence for Nokia's navigation service, allowing user not only to plan routes ahead of time, as they can with the free version, but also to try out the app's turn-by-turn guidance, which usually costs extra. Nokia said it would increase the number of downloadable maps to 150 during the second half of the year. That said, only around 50 of them can be used for navigation. If you want audible instructions there is an additional cost attached and prices start from £5 for a 5-day trial to £50 for 3-years. With no Point of Interest data installed, city guides are also an optional extra.
I connected my handset and installed/downloaded UK/Ireland map data via my PC. The installer then transfered the maps to my handset pretty simple i thought. The opening sequence of Nokia Maps is just like google earth, with a large 3D image of earth which then continues to zoom in until you reach your GPS position. Showing you very detailed maps of your area, points of interest, fuel stations, banks, hotels, internet enabled areas, golf courses, libraries just to name a few. A very good application even if it does literally suck the battery life from the phone.

Its music player and speakers i found to be outstanding. Far better than anything i've seen before or since. Stereo speakers located either side of the screen, which are loud and clear, suprisingly they have some base/warmth to whatever they play too. The N95 has a standard headphone jack too which is nice as there is no need for any adapters. The slider also incorporates all the music buttons you need while listening to music on your handset. Play, stop & previous/next track. I actually installed DIVX on my handset to watch films that i had available and i must say that although it was viewed on a small screen he experience was "ok". The film quality was DVD like and sound was excellent. If you have the luxury of the 8GB version the limits to what you can have stored on the phone are vastly imporved.

It might seem like i'm slating this handset but that is not the case, i was just let down by it's lack of overall build and didn't think it was that good when it came to value for money. But aside from all that this handset is very very cabpable, highly customisable and is very nice to own. I also has a 5 Mega Pixel Camera, with carl Zeiss lens (not sure what that is but i'm sure its great) lol. The camera takes excellent pictures and i used it on many occasion and even took pictures for ebay of my car that i was selling. They came out brilliant and eventually sold the car for me. As we all know appearance is everything in this world.