I wrote yesterday about my short-lived affair with a Nexus One, and alluded to the fact that my venerable Nokia N95, which I purchased in the spring of 2008, returns to the fore as my trusty backup device. I thought it a good time to mention a few things that I love about the N95:
- The “macro mode” on its camera, that lets me take in-focus pictures of tiny object close up, is really good and I use it all the time for taking photos of receipts and newspaper clippings and tiny things.
- The Gravity application for Series 60 phones like the N95 is a staggering work of genius: it’s client for Twitter, Foursquare and Google Reader and its brilliantly designed and simple to use.
- The ProfiMail email application is also a brilliant app: it allows me to ditch the native Nokia email app, which is abysmal, and replaces it with a compact, full-featured email client that has no trouble at all working with my IMAP server.
- As much as I’m not a fan of the multi-button Android approach to UI, I really love the dedicated music player buttons on the N95: there’s play, pause, forward and back buttons that slide out if you slide the phone in the opposite way to the way you slide it for the numeric keypad, and I use them all the time for listening to music and podcasts.
- Although it’s inferior in many ways to Google Maps, the fact that I can use Ovi Maps on the device with pre-loaded maps means that I don’t need data connectivity for maps. That said, it’s annoying that Nokia hasn’t released the updated “includes free navigation” app for the N95 that they released months ago for other phones.
- The N95 has SIP deeply integrated into the “telephone” app, meaning that I can make VOIP calls on the phone in exactly the same way that I make cellular calls, with all the same UI, features, etc. I really appreciate having VOIP as a capability rather than an application.
- The Nokia Internet Radio and Podcasting applications, while not perfect, operate as advertised and are perfectly serviceable apps for listening to streaming radio and managing podcasts respectively.
- Although their commitment to Python isn’t perhaps as strong as it once was, the fact that Nokia released and supported Python for S60 makes application development for the N95 drop-dead simple. It’s not easy to make distributable apps in Python, but for hacking together purpose-built personal apps, it’s still the best tool on the market.
Of course there are plenty of things I don’t like about the N95 – it’s wifi handling is fundamentally broken, the hardware is way too sensitive to moisture, the Ovi Store is unwieldy behemoth, the anemic Flickr support for the “share” application – but I’ve learned to live with those and, frustrating as they may be, I’ve been able to work around these limitations.
Comments
The newest version of Gravity supports sending images to Flickr, and is better / works more often than the built in “Share” (but is still not as good as ShoZu once was).
I’ve been making good use of the Flickr integration in Gravity. But what I miss is an easy way to upload a bunch of images (Share Online is limited to 6 at a time) to Flickr. Might be able to achieve this through PixelPipe, but I’ve not tried yet.