So the first thing I found interesting was this press picture:

Those A + B dedicated gaming buttons have now been fully assimilated into Nokia's media playback keypad and it's nice to see that they're no longer an afterthought. (as in, "oh yeah, and by the way, the dedicated music keys also double as game buttons" kind of thing) While the slide-out gaming keys solve the problem of having buttons way too close to the display (N81 style), it now presents a different problem, which is: it's weird. It doesn't really feel right because your hands are essentially on two different levels - not to mention that you're also putting pressure over an area that has no support under it (see N96 directional keys).

Okay, now let's talk battery life. Nokia's German specs said that the N96 would have a 950 mAh battery, and the official data sheet confirms this. On one hand, it's not so bad because that 950 mAh-er translates into *almost* 4 hours of battery life (220 min). But on the other hand, it's 4 hours of battery life. That's not a whole lot. Music playback is rated at 14 hours in offline mode, which honestly is cheaping out like crazy because no one's seriously going to go offline and listen to some tunes.

Other than that, the N96 is looking to be the powerhouse of Nokia's 2008 line. You get a large, 2.8" screen, a whopping 16 gigabytes of internal memory (and support for expandable memory on top of that), a nice camera (Carl Zeiss, 5 megapixels, dual LED flash, the whole nine yards), A-GPS + location tagger, HSDPA (WCDMA 900/2100), and of course, the kick-stand, in a package that's slightly thinner than the original N95.

Alas, the N96 won't start shipping until the third quarter of 2008, a time that seems light-years away. And the price is sure to break some hearts/wallets: the Nokia N96 will retail for 550 euros = a little over 800 US dollars.

Nokia N96 Data Sheet

Tags: n96, nokia, phones

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