Nokia N96 (unlocked) smart phone

The Nokia N96 ($775, unlocked) caused a lot of international buzz when it debuted earlier this year. Finally, ten months later, a U.S. version has shipped, but it wasn't worth the long wait: Though this model has the same excellent multimedia and camera features as its predecessor, the Nokia N95, the N96 just doesn't stack up to the competition at this point. The N96 lacks a touch screen and a full QWERTY keyboard, in contrast to the T-Mobile G1, the HTC Touch Pro, and the BlackBerry Bold. Another issue: This model feels more cheaply made, which we don't expect from a premium phone that costs nearly eight bills.

In the design, very little has changed between the N95 and N96. The 4.0-by-2.2-by-0.7-inch phone is just a smidgen larger and heavier (at 4.4 ounces) than its predecessor. The handset is bulkier than many of the models on our Top 10 Smart Phones chart, though it doesn't feel bulky in the hand. It retains the N95's dual-slider design, but the screen size is 0.2 inches larger diagonally. The slider design is easy to move one-handed, but the mechanism now feels somewhat flimsy--likely due in part to this phone's use of plastic components instead of metal. The phone's plastic encasing seems a bit cheap overall; I was afraid that if I dropped the phone, the back would completely shatter.

In my hands-on tests, the quad-band Nokia N96 had very good call quality in San Francisco. Voices sounded loud and clear enough, with no static and hum. On a few calls the voices sounded slightly hollow, as if somebody were speaking in a tunnel, but that happened only occasionally. For the most part, people on the other end reported clear voices with very little background noise.

Nokia rates the phone's battery for up to 160 minutes of talk time on 3G, and 200 hours of standby time. We'll update this review with a final rating once the PC World Test Center completes its battery-life tests.

The biggest difference between the N96 and its predecessor is its 16GB of flash memory (the N95 had merely half of that). This is a huge boon, because the N96 has excellent video and music capabilities. You can store up to 40 hours of video and up to 12,000 audio tracks in the on-board memory. Not enough for you? The N96 also has a microSD slot on its left side for more storage.

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