I recently took the plunge and changed my beloved Sony Ericsson K800i phone (Goodbye Mobile, Hello Mobile) for a Nokia N95 8GB. I have previously pondered over the Nokia E61i with its full keyboard and emailing capabilities as well as the Blackberry 8820 (which is still sitting on a shelf in my house) and Sony Ericsson P1i.

I predominantly use my phone as a camera so the 5MP camera on the Nokia was very tempting and finally persuaded me to part with the K800i.

The Nokia N95 8GB is much lighter than I was expecting (128g) and is a reasonable size (it fits nicely in my hand anyway!) and the thing I really like is the responsiveness of the interface (S60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 1). Several phones I have tried previously have suffered from quite a sluggish interface which severely detracts from use but the Nokia moves along quite swiftly.

The double sliding mechanism is also quite handy allowing a swift change to landscape mode with only the media buttons visible making watching videos, music visualisations and reviewing the gallery particularly friendly.

The screen is a large 2.8″ QVGA (240 x 320 pixels) TFT with 16 million colours (I haven’t counted them). I have also been pleased with the camera which takes some clear and well colour balanced shots, and the video playback (output leads to a TV are included) is also great which came in handy recently when we wanted to watch the video of our recent family expedition. Talking of the camera a cool little application allows you to read those two dimensional bar codes that are becoming quite popular (What can you make of this?).

The battery (1200mAH) is also reasonable although a day of shooting video, taking pictures, and watching playback eventually drained the battery from a full charge but so far I get around three days of average use out of the device before I need to charge it again.

J2ME support is included (Java MIDP 2.0, CLDC 1.1) which has helped in my Uni work (as I needed to develop a mobile Java push application), Flash Lite 2.0 is also supported. I haven’t used the GPS functionality yet or the FM Radio

The phone does include a wide range of connectivity options including:

• Integrated wireless LAN (802.11 b/g)
• UPnP (Universal Plug and Play)
• Bluetooth with A2DP (Bluetooth stereo audio)
• USB 2.0 (Micro USB)

The keypad has some nice rounded keys which makes dialling numbers or punching out SMS messages easier – even for someone with big fingers like mine. The automatic soft button locking mechanism when the device is closed is also useful, you have to press the left then the right soft key to make the keys usable. Accidentally dialling people because I had forgotten to lock the keypad was a regular occurrence with my old K800i.

The full specifications of the Nokia N95 8GB can be obtained from the Nokia Web site.