I’ve been using the N96 since I got back from my vacation, and have some thoughts that I wanted to share, specifically in response to Whatleydude’s post last week. The Nokia N96 I’m using is a Euro version, with firmware v11.101. Apparently, this firmware is only available through NSU, and not through FOTA. I’ll agree this is a big issue, and one that Nokia will hopefully spend some resources addressing. I’m also curious as to which firmware the NAM unit (that starting shipping recently) is on.
First up – the battery. This is a major point of contention, and after 2 weeks of full-time usage (one before and one after my vacation), I have some thoughts on it. First off, with Nokia Email set to Push, and the Jaiku S60 application running on EDGE, I’m pretty impressed to say that I could easily last through the workday with a single charge, and have power to spare.The first week I had the phone, I got it on Monday, and it was Thursday before I had successfully ‘killed’ the battery in a single day. This was thanks to some extended GPS, a handful of photos, a video, some WiFi usage, and a smattering of SMS.
While I was driving around California last week, we did use the N96 as an in-car MP3 player (since it has massive amounts of storage, and killer speakers). I was rather disappointed, though, that in offline mode (with no SIM), I was only able to squeeze around 6 hours of music playback out of it before we were kicked into Power Save mode. For the record, the only thing I’ve found Power Save to do is automatically dim the backlight, and the few times it came on, the phone itself died within an hour or so – which tells me that Power Save mode is rather useless, in practice.
Having had the N95-1 for a long while, I can easily say that yes, Nokia was able to squeeze more life out of the BL-5F with the N96, and I can easily believe that it’s due to improvements within S60v3 Feature Pack 2. HOWEVER, I’m still *really* bothered with how close my N95-3′s 1200mAh battery is to fitting comfortably within the N96.
I’ll allow for Nokia’s claim that the battery consumption has been improved in the N96 over the N95-1. What still bothers me is the amount of negativity that the N96 has received for using the same battery. It seems to me that Nokia could have avoided the hassle of having to convince people that the power management is there, and could have easily eliminated alot of the negative press going around with the N96, if they’d only used this larger battery.
Please note that I’m not saying it was a tragedy to use this smaller battery, or that I think, for a non-power user, it’s really a complete dealbreaker. I’m only saying that it seems Nokia would have been better off succumbing to the users and putting the bigger battery in there from the get-go. Why set yourself up to have to explain it constantly, instead of just putting the bigger battery in to begin with?
