I know this is a very presumptuous and dangerous title, but I assume it. Let’s start from the beginning. I have had the N95 8GB for a while now (time flies by so fast!) and I have been enjoying every bit of it, not to the fullest due to a bonchitis that has left me in bed for days, but as much as I can. By wandering around doing the N95 8GB Lebanon Ambassador “campaign”, I have been able to demonstrate the power crammed in this tiny piece of plastic and metal. It’s what I call: when art meets function because frankly, you can’t tell how marvelous the design of the N95 8GB is until you hold one.
To cut to the chase, the N95 8GB is perfect in so many ways, except Gaming. I am not saying that it doesn’t provide a good gaming experience, the TV-Out and 2.8″screen are too good to be true, but I am saying that this particular feature of the device isn’t as perfect as the other aspects. Why? I’ve got two words for you: Battery and Keypad. Let’s delve into these, shall we?
Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s got a charger, i need to make a call?
The first day I used the N95 8GB, I had an empty battery (aka the phone went dead) by noon. When I read that some people killed their N95 battery by mid-day, I was screaming tragedy and thinking that they were aliens. Then I heard these same people say that the N95 8GB, with its bigger battery, lasted them the whole day. That’s why I was more than outraged to see my battery die by noon. I thought it was a matter of me not leaving the device alone for a second the whole time, because it was new and I was trying everything on it. But when the problem re-occured the second, third, fourth and fifth day, lasting to 2 or 3 pm max, I was furious. I wasn’t doing anything more than 20 to 30 minutes of music, some picture and video taking, some demos, and seldom 1-2 minute calls. Nothing that should drain the battery so fast. I reported my problem to Ricky who, after making sure there was no 3G in the country, advised me to change the Call Network setting from Dual Mode to GSM only. “That should do it” he said, and well it did it, or most of it. I can now proudly say that the battery is lasting me the whole day, with 1-2 hours of WiFi browsing, pictures, music, video… except gaming. Try to run Sky Force Reloaded or Global Race for an hour or more and see what happens. You are mostly left with 1 or 2 battery bars (3 if you’re coming from a full just-finished-charging battery).
I want to make a point here. I am a good gamer, not in the sense that I spend most of my day playing games, but in the sense that when one day I decide to play a game, then I do it for 1-2 hours. A good gamer doesn’t play for 5 minutes and stops, a good gamer is someone who does 1 – 2 hours of gaming planned in his day. And a good game is a game that hooks you up in front of your TV, PC or portable gaming machine for hours to say the least. 5 to 10 minutes are good for a quick Sudoku, Backgammon or Solitaire game.
If Nokia is targeting the 20-30 minutes subway/train commuters or the 5-10 minutes toilet recreational gamers (it’s a reality so why deny it?) then they’re good. But if they are targeting the guy that sits in front of the TV with his PS3 or Wii for 2 hours minimum, then they’re doomed. No serious gamer would consider N-Gage as a good replacement to a PSP or a Nintendo DS, because he will notice that if he played a little bit longer than expected, he won’t be able to make his device last the day for casual calls, messaging or email checking.
Plus the N-Gage experience means not only gaming, but also connecting with the community, uploading results, downloading game trials…, which means that you would also need to have a WiFi connection active, not all the time probably but some of the time. In this case, I am curious to see how long the battery will last. You would think that with all this research, someone would have ended up finding by now a better or longer-lasting solution to the Li-ion batteries. Seems not.
Mirror mirror on the wall, my hands hurt, the device will fall!
Many people consider the N95 8GB as a comfortable keyboard. I don’t. It’s not the keys that are the problem, they are big enough and easy to press, but the problem lies in the lifted sides of the keypad. I don’t know what sick mind decided to design it this way, but I tend to lay my fingers on the side of the keypad while typing, something that I can’t do on the N95 8GB. Unless I want to end up with sore regions around my thumb’s articulation.
Another bad thing I’ve noted is that I can’t hold the device for long periods of time without having tired, even exhausted, hands. The problem is that after 30-40 minutes, I look for other ways to hold the device, move my fingers around the device to get a more comfortable grip, then give up after a couple of minutes. I repeat it’s a personal opinion but so far the 2 persons that have been sharing the N95 8GB with me for gaming purposes have had the same problem. You may not encounter it, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I know for a matter of fact that I have had this issue with my Nokia 3250, but only after 1:30 to 2 hours of gaming. That’s reasonable I believe.
I would like to get my hands on a N81, a device that doesn’t have the side-raised keypad to see if the problem relies there or in the slider form factor. But for now, I am sticking with my side-raised keypad theory.
All in all, I am fairly disappointed by the N95 8GB. You would think that with TV-Out, 8GB of internal memory and 2.8″ screen, this would be N-Gage’s flagship and foundation rock. It may turn out to be so and prove me completely wrong. But in my honest and modest opinion, the biggest biggest letdown of the N95 8GB experience so far has been gaming, compared to how well it does in every other aspect (camera, video recording, music, WiFi, GPS,…)
If Nokia plans to tackle the mobile gaming scene and change the landscape, they have to completely modify their perspective. A gamer is nothing like a casual mobile phone user. A gamer is someone who will use his device constantly for a couple of hours, unlike the mobile phone user who will throw it in his pocket and take it out every now and then for some email checking, a quick phone call or sms. So that’s why it doesn’t matter whether he has the greatest games, graphics, sounds, community, if he can’t benefit from all of that for a long time while still being comfortable.
