The Nokia N95 is an impressive device, and one that is set to become the top high end smartphone for 2007. What impresses about the N95 is that so many features have been packed into a relatively small device. Within a device little bigger than the N73 is a 5 megapixel camera (with VGA video capture too), connectivity options galore (USB, Infrared, Bluetooth, GSM, WCDMA, HSDPA and WLAN), integrated GPS, 150MB of internal memory (expandable via a microSD slot), and a feature packed and application laden software platfrom - S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1. But what's it really like to use? Here are some first impressions.

Nokia calls the N95 a multimedia computer;The N95 is just that cool. And more so than devices such as Treos and BlackBerries, the N95 could be the start of manufacturers understanding what people want to do, and putting it in a package that looks good in the office, as well as out on the town.

Out of the box, charged up and in your hand, the N95 is a very nice size. The dimensions are 9.9 x 5.3 x 2.1cm, so it's thicker than many a mobile, but unless you've been living with a particularly skinny model for a while, the N95 isn't going to feel uncomfortable. Weighing in at 120g, it's no lightweight - solid, yes; heavy, no.

The phone's frontage is dominated by a glorious 2.6in, 240 x 320, 16m-colour screen, big enough for web browsing to work and with a sufficient colour depth to bring photos and movies to life - more on these features later.

The N95 is silver-look plastic, set in a wraparound burgundy rubber-texture piece. The red sides are home to the two stereo speakers, camera controls, volume rocker switch, MicroSD slot - under, for once, a cover that's easy to open - infrared port and AV output. On the back is the autofocus camera and Carl Zeiss lens under a manually opened cover. You'll find the new, skinny style power socket and a mini USB port on the phone's base.

The numeric keypad is revealed by pushing the screen upwards in the usual slider phone fashion. The keys have a solid action and are raised slightly, making them easy to use one-handed. Entering a text is a quick process. Well, provided you don't make a mistake - the backspace C key is part of the upper key cluster, and I found it a little too easy to hit the call-break button instead, taking me out of the Messaging app back to the phone display.

Nokia N95 features a gorgeous 2.6-inch QVGA TFT screen with a 16 million-color output and 320x240 pixel resolution. Be aware, however, that it isn't a touch screen. Images and text looked great, with deep color saturation and sharp definition. You can change the theme of the home screen, backlighting time, and font size. There's also an ambient light detector to adjust the backlighting depending on your environment, which helped keep the display readable in various lighting conditions. However, we noticed the N95's screen had a nasty habit of holding fingerprints and smudges, so keep some kind of wipe cloth close by. We should also note that when you slide open the phone to access the media player controls, the screen automatically switches to Landscape mode but once you close the phone, it doesn't automatically switch back. You have to open the dial pad to get back to portrait mode, which is annoying.

The camera, which is 5 megapixels and uses Carl Zeiss optics, is on the back of the device and is accompanied by a 'ring-slider' which open and closes the shutter. Opening the shutter activates the camera application. To take pictures, the phone is held horizontally with the screen used as a view finder, as on the N73. In this mode, the capture key is on the top right of the device. This means the N95 is used in the same way as most point and shoot digital cameras, and it captures this experience more closely than its predecessors. The camera application has a number of extras, camera options now include 4 ISO settings, contrast and sharpness adjustment, and an enhanced burst mode (now with gaps of up to 15 minutes).

Standard battery, Li-Ion 950 mAh (BL-5F)
StandBy Time Up to 220 h
Talk Time Up to 6 h 30

The biggest complaint most users will have with the phone is inevitably the battery life. In terms of standard operation it's not too bad, but get busy with media playback, satellite navigation and the digital camera and you'll be lucky if you make it through the day.

Just a standard music player. It is easily controllable by the slide-out buttons, or you can use the directional pad and other front-side buttons to control the music playing action.

Getting album art to work is a bit on the difficult side for someone who is not used to digging into the file system and moving things around, but it can be fixed.

The Music Player works well in the background while doing other applications, but because of the limited RAM of the N95 (less than 20 MB on startup), browsing or viewing a ton of photos and videos can stop the party relatively quickly.

There's about 150MB of internal memory for saving your photos and videos to the phone, but we recommend saving them onto a microSD card, especially since the N95 can support up to 2GB expandable media. And sharing your memories is also easy with the ability to view them as a slide show, print them via Nokia's Xpress Solutions, upload them to the Web or Nokia's Lifeblog app, or transfer them to other devices. Also, Nokia includes video-out cables so you can hook up your N95 to your TV to view all your media on the big screen.

Nokia N95 is a quad-band phone, which means that it works in all four standard GSM frequency bands – 850, 900, 1800, and 1900 MHz. Here it offers data transfers via GPRS or EDGE. The phone also works with 3G UMTS networks. Apart from video calls you can also enjoy instant data transfers as fast as 3.6 MB/s thanks to the HSDPA support. The latter is already on the market in some countries, but there aren’t many networks with speeds above 1.8 MB/s.

Data transfers can be used for numerous applications straight in the phone no matter if you only browse the Internet, send images to your blog, download maps, or watch streamed video. If you like to use Nokia N95 as a computer modem, simply connect it and it will start working. The old famous much verified and constantly improved service program Nokia PC Suite creates all necessary settings on its own and when the phone is connected to a computer, all you need to do is click on the icon "Connect to Internet". Connecting takes a few seconds.

Using the details stored on the SIM card the phone recognizes the name of the active mobile operator and subsequently sets up all necessary data profiles - APN internet, WAP, and MMS – in accordance with this operator. If an application requiring connection to Internet is being run, Nokia N95 always asks for your preferred access point. In many cases the phone allows for presetting of a default access point that is subsequently selected automatically. Unfortunately, access points cannot be organized by priority or automatically selected according to their accessibility. To see how such options work, have a look at Sony Ericsson P990.

One of Nokia N95’s greatest assets is Wi-Fi support. There is an option for quick search of available WI-Fi networks straight on the stand-by display. It is especially useful in case that you often need to connect via Wi-Fi out of your home, in a restaurant, for example. You don’t need to search any settings in the menu; all you have to do is select a network and connect directly, without any complicated setup. Nokia N95 searches for available networks on its own and if it finds a known network, it connects to it automatically. Of course, you could deactivate the automatic network search option and save a little bit of energy.

The interesting feature of the N95 is the built-in GPS navigation system. The N95 actually has a GPS system built into the phone, that communicates directly with the satellite. This enables you to use the phone to track your position either on foot or in-car. You'll need to buy a license to use the Nokia mapping system though. Now, whilst this is a nice feature to have in a phone, we've got to say that it doesn't match the quality of a dedicated satnav system like the TomTom One. The sensitivity and reliability of the GPS receiver is not as good, and neither is the user-friendliness of the system.

These are the most groundbreaking features, but the N95 has almost everything else you could think of including in a phone too: a music player with support for all common music formats, a stereo FM radio, integrated handsfree speaker, speaker independent voice dialling, talking ringtones, HSDPA (the fast data transfer technology dubbed "3.5G") and lots more!