Well here it is, my review of the Nokia N95 8GB North American model.

Lucky for me I get to review certain products without buying them, which gives me a slight advantage even over large media companies. I got my hands on the new Nokia N95 phone and took a week to play around with it and test it out. Ill start off with the box.

You get a rather large box considering the type of phone it is. Inside I found the phone, a very large instruction manuel, headphones, headphone clip and composite cables. The phone itself is centered in the top of the box surrounded by blurry motion shots of a few girls who look like they aren’t aware that they are being photographed.

You’re welcomed by the generic Rogers login animation when you power up the device, something you are relieved of with the iPhone. The home screen simply has 2 options, Friends and Music, along with the date, time, signal strength and battery life. Unless you take the time to read the manual, you will most likely become confused at this point. There are two buttons beside the directional pad A blue button and a while one. The blue takes you to the menu, the white one takes you to the phone features, I suppose. I’m really not sure what they call it.

Unlike most phones, there is no way to put the phone into sleep mode from a power button, unless I wasn’t able to find it. Pushing the power button prompts you to turn off the device. You can scroll through that menu to Lock the keypad, but even then you don’t put the phone into standby mode. When the keyboard is locked the back-light goes off, but the screen is still on. Even now it is still displaying the time and the date. It is a useful feature encase you like checking the time, but it is very hard to see the numbers without the back-light, it is just wasting your battery.

The music player on the N95 is alright, however syncing music took a very long time. The software that comes with the N95 is windows based, and took over an hour to install on our demo laptop. After which connecting to sync music is a three step process. First you need to connect the device, and tell the Nokia software you want to sync music with Windows Music player, or any other sort of application. Second you need to copy the music to the device via the normal syncing process. The pain comes once you’ve synced your music. You must open your music player on the phone, and tell it that you’ve synced music, it than searches through is memory and adds all that music to the library. I’m not sure why it does this, as the last 4 phones I had with MP3 playing capabilities did not require this process.

The music player is good on the Nokia N95. The sound is about what you’d expect from a music phone. The shirt clip is a nice add on to allow you to control your music without taking out your phone. The speaker system is much louder than the Mono speaker on the iPhone. You can really fill up a room with sound with the small speakers on the N95. It also boasts a 3D sound option which also makes phone sound nice when listening to music on the speakerphone.

The Carl Ziess 5.0 mega-pixel camera is very nice on this phone. It gives you a true consumer level camera built into the phone, allowing you to take very detailed pictures where ever you go. The smaller camera built on the front also is a decent addition, allowing you to video call other N95 owners with a Rogers Vision Plan. The N95 also has a 2D barcode scanner, which allows you to scan a 2D barcode and tell you what the barcode says. Personally its much easier to just type what you want, rather than make the user scroll through the Menu > Applications > Office > Barcode just to view what someone has put on a piece of paper. Barcodes may be big in Japan, but are not useful for us here in North America.

The MobileTV service is not great on this phone, and I would recommend saving your data plan for something else. I found the MobileTV slower than that on the LG Vu, and it was very small. The N95 does not allow you to watch TV in landscape. And if you slide the slider down into the media mode, the phone will tell you you must slide it back before you can proceed. However, you must slide the phone from the media position all the way to the call position, and back to he normal position before that error message dissapears.

Besides the phone being as thick as 2 blackberry 8700s, the N95 is a surprisingly decent mobile phone, considering it is not a smart phone. Its got a lot of nice features that younger consumers are looking for in a mobile device. I’d assume you can connect to a mobile version of Flickr or Facebook on this device, however I wasn’t able to test this as I don’t have a data plan for this account. For $99 on a 3 year Voice + Vision plan at the Source by Circuit City, the N95 is a good value for your money. You will need to read over the 500 page instruction manual before use though.