Looking back Nokia N95: The peak but also the beginning of the end of Symbian

Tram Ho

Launched in early 2007, Nokia N95 is the highest product representing Symbian OS. This is a phone that has a lot of impressive capabilities and is even better when Nokia launches the N95 8GB version (also known as the N95-2) a few months later.

This is also the time when the first iPhone was introduced and while Apple stunned the world with the user interface built around the capacitive multi-touch screen, the iPhone itself was lacking. Many possibilities of a good smartphone.

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Keep in mind that it wasn’t until the Apple App Store launched next year that Steve Jobs and the company initially only bet on web apps. The iPhone doesn’t have GPS and its 2MP camera can’t even record video, let alone compare capabilities with the N95.

The Nokia N95 has a 5MP Camera with Carl Zeiss Tessar lens to produce beautiful photos at the time. The camera of the device can record video in “DVD quality” – VGA at 30fps, which was extremely rare at the time.

The 2.6-inch 240 x 320-pixel screen of the first N95 is not the largest or the sharpest, but it is also quite okay. The 8GB version has been upgraded to a 2.8-inch screen while retaining the same overall size.

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Nokia N95 and Nokia N95 8G

The screen is an important point on the device, with 3G and Wi-Fi providing a good web experience. The N95 also has Bluetooth 2.0, which allows you to send files quickly while Wi-Fi and cheap 3G packages were not popular at the time.

Nokia N95 comes preloaded with the Word and Excel file viewer, and you can even buy the full version of Quickoffice, which gives you the ability to edit documents.

And if you really want to edit text on your phone, there’s a scrollable Bluetooth keyboard accessory. This is a full keyboard with neat scrolling and has a phone holder.

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The N95 even offers a near-desktop experience when the 3.5mm jack can output to the Composite port, helping you connect to the TV and edit documents on the big screen.

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We now have Samsung and Huawei desktop modes. The N95 offers the same features, although perhaps it suffers from an “age-ahead” syndrome – people aren’t ready to use their phones as a desktop replacement. To be fair, the software is not really ready for that either.

More realistic, you can play Quake III, Asphalt 3 or FIFA 2007 on TV, using your phone as a gaming machine. It supports N-Gage mobile gaming services and its TI OMAP 2420 chipset powerful enough to run FPS Quake III games. It has a 330 MHz CPU and a PowerVR MBX GPU (all built on a 90nm process).

Now that the Nokia N95 8GB needs to be recalled, it has a distinct advantage – twice as much RAM, 128MB versus 64MB. Nokia N95-2 also removes microSD card.

Of course, the N95 supports MP3 and can even play videos with the RealPlayer application.

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It can serve as portable music player, no need to bother with CD anymore. And as you can imagine, the TV out function is well used, bringing your video to the big TV screen.

And talking about multimedia, we should mention the dual slider design. Swiping one way will bring up the keyboard so you can turn and enter text (it’s a pain with the T9 keyboard). Sliding in the opposite direction will bring multimedia controls – Nokia really wanted the N95 to be a comprehensive entertainment machine.

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N95 integrated GPS and Nokia Maps, this was one of the best applications at the time. However, turn-by-turn navigation is an upgrade that users pay for. Nokia got the feature for free three years later, but that was only when Symbian began to compete against other smartphone platforms.

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And Symbian was really out of the game even though at first, Nokia N95 outsold iPhone.

It can be said that N95 is the last important stronghold of the classic Symbian operating system. Changing Symbian to a touch-based operating system on the 5800 XpressMusic was hardly smooth.

While great, Symbian was dead and Nokia’s “game” with Microsoft was unsuccessful. The 2007 Nokia N95 was both a high point and a start for the end of Symbian.

Reference: GSMArena

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Source : Genk