The model index of N96 suggests its official status of a continuation of N95, the former having been announced back in spring at the mobile congress in Spain. Indeed, the device goes on with the evolution of the once successful idea by adding a digital TV unit, even more memory and such like extras. Amazingly, Nokia themselves officially pronounced N85 to be their vision of what will come next after N95 to pick up the torch. The former was presented in Moscow a few days ago, - being the most compact of all the double sliders known to exist on the market up to date. In this article we are going to track the development of the legendary cameraphone and air our recommendations on picking a replacement for N95.

Let’s make a point here that we have been examining pre-sale samples of N85 and N96, which nevertheless were very close to the final versions. Previously we had to refrain from testing and reviewing the N96 because it had so raw hardware and software that it could barely boot up, let alone a host of bugs. The camera worked so differently from what we have now that an overview based off the experience with the early samples would have turned out a sort of misinformation. The same could be said about the early N85 which had artifacts and corruptions of color dispersed all over the photos. Smape.com is the first site to have obtained and thoroughly tested the latest versions of these two handsets, sporting updated hardware and firmware. In order to produce a more objective depiction, we added the original Nokia N95 and Samsung i8510 to the contest.

Model:	Nokia N85	Nokia N96
Connectivity:	EGSM 850/900/1800/1900, WCDMA 900/1900/2100	EGSM 850/900/1800/1900, WCDMA 900/2100
Storage:	74 Mb of user memory, microSD slot, 8 Gb card bundled	16 Gb of onboard storage, microSD slot, 8 Gb card bundled
Screen:	2,6" , QVGA (240х320), 16M	2,8" , QVGA (240х320), 16M
Connectivity:	USB 2.0, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR, A2DP supported	USB 2.0, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR, A2DP support
Camera:	5 MP, 2592 x 1944 pixels, Carl Zeiss optics, autofocus, video (VGA 30fps), LED flash	5 MP, 2592 x 1944 pizels, Carl Zeiss optics, autofocus, video (VGA 30fps), LED flash
Battery:	BL-5K, 1200 mAh	BL-5F, 950 mAh
Measurements:	103 x 50 x 16 mm	103 x 55 x 18 mm
Weight:	128 g	125 g
Price:	555 euros	700 euros

Regardless of an early announce of N96 in Spring, it will start selling in Europe not until October arrives. The delay is explained by the difficulties the company had to overcome before the new hardware platform on which the model is based reached a stable operation. We’ll make a further point of it below, but let’s start the overview with the aspects of design and ergonomics.

Design and Ergonomics

The style of N96 is an intermediate solution between the older and newer concepts used by the company in product design. N85 definitely looks better, standing closer to the newer design trend adopted by Nokia. Have a look at 6600 and you’re pretty sure to snatch the idea. N85 and N96 are entirely composed of plastic while the 6600 slide makes an extensive use of metal, though. Materials other than plastic are reserved for Eseries and S40 products, in Nokia’s philosophy. N85 and N96 display an almost identical quality of plastic save for the face panel, which is definitely better in Nokia N85. The rounded, lacquered casing looks quite elegant; both smartphones are rather exposed to soiling, though.

The quality of assembly is on a comparable level for the both models, the only exception being the slider mechanism. It produces a much better impression in N85. The N96 has a jerky, tight slider, which might be a bit annoying to the more picky buyers. The size and weight are two of the major points making up the ergonomics score. N96 is too wide to sit in the hand naturally. That happens primarily because of a large screen, N85 has a screen with a diagonal shorter by a 0.2’’ – the same situation with N95 and N95 8Gb. A bigger casing, surprisingly, does not improve the operational comfort of the N96 keyboard. The upper button row is too close to the edge, and the rest of the rows suffer from a poor segmentation. SMS typing feels much better with an N85.

A couple of words on the colors. N96 will only come in black, and N85 is currently available in purple and brown, with a few extra colors to come. The lens framing alternatively serves as a tip-up prop enabling the phone to stand on a surface when you want to comfortably browse through your photos and videos. N85 has nothing of the kind, but you will eventually discover an FM transmitter which is nowhere around in N96. The charger jack is the same thing with the microUSB slot in N85, making it the first Nokia smartphone to possess a USB charging capability. N96 doesn’t replenish the battery charge while being connected to another device with the data cable.

An active lens guard is something only found in N85. A slide of the lens guard launches the camera application, which is just immensely handy. Dedicated player buttons are grouped around the central joystick button. With N85, you get these buttons only backlit if the player is running – not a critical but very neat designer’s trick. We are generally inclined to think that Nokia didn’t care too much about the appearance, looking more on the lumberjack’s side rather than on the gentleman’s, and doesn’t stand well against the elegance of N85.

Screen

The screen of N85 is identical in size to the original N95 (2.6’’) but bases off the AM-OLED technology. This helps to notch down the power consumption and gives a better looking palette. Oh well, the view angles also appear wider and the refresh rate is pleasantly high. On the whole, this screen is obviously better than the display of N95 8GB, - but don’t take this as an offense to the latter, its screen is just plainly good but N85 offers a perfection in this aspect.

To do N96 justice, we must tell you that the color palette reproduced by its screen looks a bit more natural, but that doesn’t help the cause much. A larger diagonal is a much more serious matter, doubling its importance for every fan of digital books optimized for reading from a screen of a handheld gadget. Both models offer a comparable quality of TV picture when you use the TV-out.

Camera

Following the tradition, Nokia equipped the two models with a (high-)standard camera unit carrying Carl Zeiss optics. Upon a closer inspection it is revealed that the photo quality is actually different. Prior to testing we made sure that all the settings had been set the same (the flash is identical in both models, - a double LED unit a bit weaker than the xenon flash of N82, for example). Let’s quite the official specifications of the two cameras:

Nokia N85	Nokia N96
CMOS-sensor, 5 Mp Maximum resolution: 2592x1944 Lens aperture: 1:2.8, focal distance 5.45	CMOS-sensor, 5 Mp Maximum resolution: 2592x1944 Lens aperture 1:2.8, focal distance 5.2

How exactly the difference between the 5.2 and 5.45 tells on practice? The idea is simple: just have a look at the pictures and see how the focal distance and viewing angles are related.

In an actual photo, it works like this:

As you see, a shorter focal distance stands for a larger viewing angle. In other words, the lens grabs a bigger fragment of a real-life picture from the surrounding panorama. Special tasks may require the opposite, though most casual users will be better off with a shorter focal distance. It equals to 5.6 in Nokia N82 and N95, 5.7 in i5810 and so on. This doesn’t influence the quality of the resulting picture at all, yet the pictures taken with different focal distances differ accordingly:

Nokia N85 / N96

As you see, N85 is leading in test with flash turned on and off alike. We took a series of pictures with a Samsung i8510 in the same environment for an objective comparison:

Samsung GT-i8510

Hardware Platform

The hardware platform of Nokia N96 is totally different form the chipset used in N85 and other Nokias. The new hardware platform is a Nomadics STn8815 chip by STMicroelectronics. This fact caused a great amount of arguments, for some people had recklessly put an equation mark between N85 and N96, wasting their breath about the same hardware lying in the base of the two handsets. Nokia N85 uses the regular hardware same with N78 and N81.

As seen from the test score, N96 displays a lower performance than N85 and a much worse one than N95 basing off OMAP 2420. The lack of a 3D accelerator is blatant in the JBenchmark 3D test. N96 lags behind in other tests as well. The gap may be accounted for by the use of a newly developed platform, while N85 employs a platform which has been through a long evolution of improvements and optimizations shared by Nokia N78 and N81 models. There’s little sense in repeating the descriptions of this platform since it has already been dealt with in our review of Samsung i450. Despite the lags seen in the tests, N85 and N96 have identical audio quality, a bit above the sounding of N78 and a bit below than Samsung i8510 INNOV8. The audio quality provided by N78 seems to please the majority of the owners, so an even better sound is simply great.

Nokia N85 / N96

Nokia N96 / N85

Let’s have a brief overview the difference between the STn8810 and OMAP 2420 chipsets. Theoretically possessing worse characteristics than TI OMAP 2520, the new chipset pays back with a lower power consumption, high sound quality (out of the box, we don’t regard the possible use of additional dedicated sound processing chips) and better video processing algorithms. The most effort was invested into making the battery life longer. It’s about the time to dismiss the fear that the low-capacity battery used in Nokia N96 (950 mAh) won’t be enough for comfortable operation. Actually, the device can run longer than most TI OMAP solutions, the advantage becoming increasingly obvious during video and music playback. STn8815 is optimized for minimal energy consumption; it will automatically drop the CPU frequency to a level sufficient for normal functioning of an application but not a notch above. It also makes an extensive use of smart accelerators and divided calculation techniques to drop the load on the CPU. Inactive chipset components are automatically powered off until a need arises to put them back online, the CPU stays in a power-saving mode as long as possible. Code execution efficiency was maximized through numerous optimizations as well.

STMicroelectronics Nomadics STn8815 Specifications

We didn’t manage to spot any tangible performance boost in most menus and applications as compared to OMAP 2420. The lack of a hardware 3D accelerator is the only weak point distinguishing STMicroelectronics chips from their OMAP 2420/2430 counterparts as goes to performance. On the other hand, the use of 3D acceleration was intentionally minimized in N95 and N82 (it wasn’t even used in N-Gage games) and totally missing in Samsung i550/i560, so we wouldn’t consider this lack a critical downside of STn8815-based products.

SMAPE's opinion

We believe that N96 can not justify the high price it sells for by its scarce advantages. We would never recommend it as a replacement for N95 or its upgraded version N95 8Gb – you are basically getting nothing from what you would want to see in a smartphone priced like that. A digital TV tuner isn’t overly demanded on the market, so this addition won’t pass for a real advantage. The rest of improvements are even less significant. At the same time, N85 appears to be a perfectly balanced solution worthy of being titled as the successor to N95 with multiple improvements in all departments of functionality and also a better looking appearance, higher quality of materials and assembly.

Detailed reviews of Nokia N85 and N96 are to be published on the site shortly. Stay tuned with Smape.com and be the first to learn their secrets!

Author: Dmitry Ryabinin

SMAPE.com

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