Nokia N96 review

The Nokia N96 comes in a sleek package. A picture of the phone is displayed on the top side, and the internal memory of 16GB is mentioned. Upon opening the box, you will find the N96 placed in a picture. When opening the picture, you will find a surprisingly large amount of standard included accessories. The box contains a battery charger, car charger, battery, headset, USB cable, manuals, software and a cable to connect the N96 to a television set. This means you don't have to purchase any other accessory except for maybe a pouch. The cell phone itself looks neat too, although somewhat on the large side. The Nokia N96 is able to slide two ways. If you slide open to the top, the standard buttons will appear, if you slide open to the bottom, the monitor will rotate automatically and short-cuts for multimedia applications will appear.

Nokia N96 digital camera
The integrated camera in the Nokia N96 features a Carl Zeiss lens and offers a resolution of 5 Megapixels. Pictures made with the Nokia N96 are excellent in comparison to other 5.0 Megapixel cameraphones. Colors are reproduced perfectly and the contrast is fine. One thing very noticeable is the digital noise that pops up if a too high ISO sensitivity is used in combination with a large amount of pixels on the tiny sensor, unlike regular digital cameras.

Nokia N96 multimedia computer
The main downside we encounter on most mobile phones is the delay of the camera. It is kind of a problem for both starting up the camera as well as capturing a subject. This is also the case for the Nokia N96; when starting up the monitor remains black for a few seconds, a nuisance if you want to capture a quick moment. And if you try to capture the subject next, it should not move for a while or the picture will turn out blurred. Pressing and capturing takes approximately two seconds. This exposure / shutter delay is an annoying feature which does not facilitate shooting with a mobile phone. It is a common problem. Besides that, the shutter release is not half of what it should be. It is hard to depress it completely at times, thus only exposing and not actually taking a picture. It happened to me frequently and it certainly does not add to the joy of photographing.

Nokia N96 review
When the camera application is completely started, the entire big monitor serves as viewfinder, which makes it ever so easy to see how the actual picture will turn out. The monitor shows shortcuts for settings such as contrast, sharpness and flash settings. In Scene mode, you have the choice for the close-up mode for example; however, its default setting is automatic whilst for every situation the best possible setting will be evaluated. When you have adjusted the scene mode, and when the camera application is finally restarted, it will automatically be set to standard, preventing it from remaining in the wrong mode.