Hands on with the Nokia N96

At the Nokia Press event today, I also had the opportunity to get some hands on time with the Nokia N96. The first thing I noticed was the size, it was smaller than I expected. The design is similar to the N95, with the dual slider, but overall reflects more the N81 in design. Some people are not too impressed by this, for myself I like the look of the phone.

The screen is large, and dominates the handset when closed. Open, and you see a good keypad, well laid out and very easy to use. There will be no problems with text input on this phone.

A lot of the innovation on the N96 is inside. Firstly there is support for DVB-H which is basically support for digital television. I'm not sure how this affects us in the UK, the last time there was a Nokia phone with DVB-H support it didn't release in the UK as our digital signal is not compatible. For more technical detail, see here, here and here.

The N96 is endowed with an impressive 16GB of internal memory and there is also support for Micro SD cards, so in theory you could increase capacity to an amazing 32GB. For now you will have to make do with 24GB as 16GB cards will not likely be on the market until towards the end of 2008 (My guess, not based on any concrete info)

The N96 has a mini 'kick stand' at the back. In place it sits flush around the camera lens, opened out it allows the phone to stand for watching video. The N96 will support WMV videos and it is expected to also support DivX video during the handsets lifecycle.

Overall I was again impressed with the Nokia N96, the build quality was solid, the slide worked well, and the screen is very bright and clear. One thing I did like, thanks to the FP2 support, is using the phone theme you can finally remove the Nokia calendar from the front screen. Well, kind of. What actually happens is the theme will remove the standby icons from there normal position across the main screen, and list them down the left handside. You can choose which icons appear, so if you decide not to include the calendar, then obviously it won't appear. If you do choose the calendar, then appointments are only shown if you highlight the calendar icon, a mini screen pops up. Much better than the way all appointments are shown on the main screen right now, but not quite as good as the ESeries plugins.

Tomorrow I am flying out to Barcelona to attend the MWC, I will try and get some more info on the new phones, and some more pictures.