N96 and N78 hands-on overview

N96 and N78 hands-on overview

Finally managed to get my hands-on these fabulous devices and ask few questions on this and that. I’ve compared the N96, N82 black, N78, N81 8GB, and the N95 8GB. It took some effort to present the differences, and I managed to get everyone staring at me like I was a maniac.

Below you can notice the dimensions comparison between all those phones mentioned above. From the top: N95 8GB, N82 Black, N96, N81 8GB N81 8GB, N78 (thanks to everyone who pointed out this mistake).

An obvious observation here is that the N95 8GB is the thickest of them all, while the N96 and N95 8GB seem to be the widest thanks to their 2.8″ display.All the phones have the 3.5mm jack on top, while only the N81 8GB and N96 have the lock switch. The N78 and N82 Black don’t have the USB port or the charging port on the bottom.

N78 notes
Notice anything different between the image with the keypad backlight lit and the one that’s not lit? This innovative and amazing design with all black seems to hide some of the keys and make the device look superslick. A small but fantastic detail.

The keypad seems to have a gap next to the green key (call key), and according to Henri Mattila, it’s so that people don’t press keys by mistake. I kept on pressing it, as my finger recognized it as the Menu key, but the Menu key is on the left side of the numeric keypad. The keypad in general, you just have to get used to it, it isn’t as bad as it looks, the keys are well rised and your fingers can differentiate. Henri even proposed a competition and said he could type on the N78 faster than ANY of us on OUR phones

N96 notes
At the right N96 N81 8GB, and at the left the N81 8GB N96. It’s not just the display that’s bigger, but there are few minor changes in cosmetics on the front. The keys are slightly separated, and the multimedia key is smaller. The navi-wheel is made thinner and higher so that it feels good to the finger.

The N96 has a larger camera button, which is better for capturing and autofocus. Another change is the speaker placement. The N96 has a new speaker positioning, which is drives sound better if the phone is kept on the kickstand according to Matilla, and I truly agree with him.
The N96 has definitely a better keypad. Besides having wider keys, there are visual separations between them, and it’s much more “typeable” than the N81’s keypad. The slider itself feels like a mix between the N81’s and N95’s slider, not too rough, not too springy.

The N95 8GBs multimedia keys are considerably smaller than the N96’s. The kickstand feels really useful, and we miss it on the N95. We have never noticed the kickstand feature, but now that we have it, it really seems useful for multimedia playback or other features. The N96 is very loud when it comes to music or video, possibly one of the loudest phones in the market. The video player can play the files from beginning or from where you left the video last time.

The N96’s camera and flash seem to be quite larger than the N95 8GB. The N95 has a round outline to it, while the N96 has an oval outline to it, where the kickstand resides.
The SPMark wouldn’t install, so I cannot get you a score, and I could take videos either as the video recording application would crash after two seconds of recording.

A new feature in both these phones was the task switcher option in all applications. Whenever you press the left soft key, you could call the task switcher.
The software installed was quiet weak, one of the devices wasn’t working, while all others would crash often. The navi-wheel had no functionality.

More inside on these NSeries soon as I publish my interview with Henri Mattila, but for now please appreciate the interview with Alex Lambeek, VP for entry-level devices at Nokia.

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