Around 2 months ago, I decided to sell my old Nokia 3250 as well as my Qtek 9100 in order to get a second hand N95-1. Basically, I got it for around 350$, quite the sum when you’re an unemployed college student. But I knew I would be getting the do-it-all king of handsets. One week into it, I was in love with what’s inside the hood, but not with the hood itself.
I am still in disbelief as to whether Nokia could put something like the N95 together. I mean Nokia are the kings of sturdy and amazingly built devices, we have praised them for years now for how you can drop your Nokia, then pick it up and get going like nothing ever happened. Unfortunately, this is not something you can say about the N95. Even though mine is a 2nd hand device, and I am sure the previous owner wasn’t a careful one, the built quality is simply NOT acceptable for a 1yr old handset. The slider is wobbly as hell, and when it’s closed, I have heartaches each time I use the d-pad because I feel it’s collapsing under my fingers. The screws used to keep the top part of the screen with the slider together are super poor quality, and totally useless now, to a point where I decided to glue the screen parts together, yes GLUE them. There’s also a defect in the way the back cover gets fixed on the device.
I have had other sliders from Nokia in my hand, like mainly the 6111 and the E65. Those were sliders, like sliders are supposed to be. Superbly built, extremely nice feel in the hand, and well there isn’t a glitch about them. Now try to grab an Nseries slider, and see how poorly they’re built. It annoys the hell out of me. I wonder why Nokia considers that business users deserve a well-built handset, but not entertainment and power-users. I mean this is the category of people which is most likely to drop the device, or send it flying across the room: they are active people. Plus the N95 has so many features, it basically begs to be handled and used.
In conclusion, I decided I won’t be buying a slider Nseries handset from Nokia again, since they consider they don’t deserve a decent external quality to match with the hardware inside. It’s candybar all-the-way for me.
