Why I simply had to have the "Emperor's New Phone" (Nokia N95)

First off, have a look at Mike’s robust character assasination of the Nokia N95 (and the chumps wanting to get one) on my earlier post:

Link: SMS Text News » My Nokia N95 arrives tomorrow

Reasons for getting the Emperor’s New Phone, er, I mean N95:
WiFi…ooops, plenty of other handsets have that – for years in some cases.

OK, must be the 3.5mm headset jack. Hmmm….fancy a bent audio plug?

Safari browser? Flash player? Maps? stereo Bluetooth? available elsewhere.

GPS? only if you plan to spend 4-ish minutes starting up, are OK with standing stock still while it acquires a lock, happy to have the slide open all the time (forget Landscape mode then), and never intend driving under a bridge or through a tunnel, or downtown, or anywhere where there is less visible sky than, say, the Salisbury plains.

Battery life? Better carry a few spares then for the day’s business chap.

Shiny looks? You’ll have lots of chances to show it off while you are waiting for it to reboot, after trying something tricky like receiving an SMS whilst browsing a website.

Estimated ‘Time To Chumpness’ for the N95? 3 months, tops.

My prediction? Prepare to be underwhelmed….

(disclaimer: I’m going off experience of 3 months near-continuous – and initially ecstatic – N95 enforced usage. Couldn’t get back to my N73 with Bluetooth GPS module fast enough. Sorry to be a downer, but if I’d parted with real cash to purchase this phone I’d be using the GPS to locate a nearby clifftop. Luckily my wife would have time to work out why I was unhappy, book therapy and get me well again before I got a meaningful GPS result. And I ain’t alone.)

I am on your plane of thought Mike. Totally.

Let me tell you why I had to get an N95.

I’m a mobile geek of sorts. People on trains look at me like I’m some (rather old, no glasses) Harry Potter when I sit down next to them and take out one phone. Then another phone. Then another. And perhaps, if they’re lucky, I might actually be carrying a forth handset. Eyes widen. Comments abound.

If you’re in Scotland or the North East, where folk are a little bit more friendly to strangers bearing tons of high tech handsets (I’m not a terrorist, mind, these are all top of the range handsets, not your Nokia Christmas Cracker handsets), then you’re generally guaranteed to get some sort of ‘You like your mobiles dontcha?’ comment.

So here I am, a self fulfilling prophecy. I write a mobile blog. So I feel like I should have up to date related technology. I am a technology fiend as well, so any excuse to get the latest gadgets…. oh… well, I write a mobile blog… soo…. woops… KERPLUNK! That’s another 500 quid on a Nokia N93.

I was sat in the rather beautiful gardens of Mar Hall discussing a range of business related elements with Hetty on Saturday. We’d just agreed not to start a new company, not at the moment, anyway, so that conversation theme had just ended. Hetty then volunteered that her sister, Charlotte, a shit-hot TV producer, had just turned up bearing a Nokia N95.

I was momentarily speechless.

“Er. Sorry, you mean the new one? The NEW Nokia N95?” I asked.
“Yeah, it’s really nice, very light,” came Hetty’s innocent reply.

Arse.

Well that’s it then. I wasn’t really obsessing much over the N95. I was, until a few seconds ago, quite delighted to let the other geeks out there get hold of their N95s, do their unpacking photos and get generally excited about the handset’s arrival. I was content to let the furore calm down and then maybe get hold of one later on. Perhaps after I’d seen a colleague’s device and tried it out.

I was exercising Geek restraint. Afterall, I saw the device at Nokia’s NokiaWorld conference last year and thought it was very cool. I have a ton of problems about Nokias being crap for music — the experience being nowhere near as good or comparable to that of an iPod.

So all was good, until I discovered Charlotte had one.

Charlotte is a normob. A normal mobile phone user. She uses her phone a ton, granted — you do, if you work as a freelance TV producer. You’re always on location, having to phone people to get them out of bed and so on. Your mobile is your office. You often find TV producers — and others working in TV — tend to spend a ton of cash on their mobile phone bills. But here was Orange, handing a normob a Nokia N95?

Disbelief and then recognition. The N95 isn’t the N93. Not at all. It’s not a specialist phone. It’s a top-of-the-range N73 killer. It’s the next best thing, the best thing you can buy in the Vodafone store. You can’t walk down the street at the moment without seeing an N95 advertised somewhere.

Ergo I can’t walk about not having had intimate knowledge of the handset, can I? I am not, afterall, just a mobile phone journalist. 😉 I have to know things. Play with things. Get annoyed with things. Delight in things.

I also reasoned that it’s worth while having T-Mobile pay the 600 quid for the handset for me up front. I assume they extended my contract. Who knows. There was no discussion or no agreement.

“I might get one actually, it’s got a 5 megapixel camera,” says Hetty.

Ok, my decision is made. I can’t in good faith be running a mobile related blog and have everyone around me getting N95s while I sit there at the back of the classroom with my E61, N73 and N93…. 😉

So it arrives this morning. I’ll get hold of it later on tonight if I have time.