Nokia N96 is a high-end smartphone, announced by Nokia on February 11, 2008 at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, part of the Nseries line. The N96 runs on the updated Symbian OS v9.3. It is compatible with the N-Gage 2.0 gaming platform and also has a DVB-H television tuner. Compared to the popular Nokia N95 8GB, the N96 has a doubled flash storage capacity, dual LEDflash in the camera, and has a slimmer design. However critics had negative views on the N96's battery life and user-unfriendlyness and its downgraded CPU clock speed raised questions. It was one of 2008's most anticipated mobile phones, but its launch was delayed and was only widely available from October 2008. It is thus considered to have been a commercial failure. Critics felt that the Nokia N85 provided more new additions compared to the N96 for much cheaper.
Release
Shipments for the N96 started in September 2008. Europe, Middle East and Asia-Pacific are the first locations to provide the handset for consumers. The American and Chinese versions were expected shortly thereafter. In the U.S., the device was sold for US$900, which was criticised for being too expensive. The general UK release date for the N96 was 1 October, although London had a separate date of 24 September when the device went on sale exclusively at Nokia's flagship stores on Regent Street and at Terminal 5.
Free sat nav – not available – Nokia advises that it is in the pipeline and they fully expect it to be made available, but will not say when it is available yet
Nokia Music Headset HS-45, AD-54
CPU: N96 has dual ARM9 264 MHz with no floating point instructions
N96 has 8x image digital zoom and 4x video digital zoom, although the benefits of this are debatable.
Same battery as original N95, but the N96 reportedly has a much better battery life using the same battery due to software improvements under Feature Pack 2
No hardware 3D graphics accelerator
No infrared port
N95 has lens cover and much more qualitative shutter
No manually selected MMS messaging mode. If you write a long text message it will automatically select the MMS mode which could stop the recipient from receiving the message if they do not have MMS set up on their handset.
VoIP 2.1 support for WLAN and Cellular. However, the built-in VoIP client from N95 which allowed the end-user to make internet calls directly without installing any additional software has been removed from N96. Nevertheless, the VoIP API still exists which can be used by software developers in their applications.
The pencil button that is used to mark/unmark items and highlight text is not included. But this action can still be done however, by pressing and holding down the # key'.
