Nokia N95 - The Music Review

[Rafe]

In the second part in our series of Nokia N95 reviews Rafe takes a comprehensive look at the music and audio functionality of the N95. Covering music software (phone and PC), Bluetooth, UPnP and more, we ask whether the Nokia N95 measures up to the competition provided by stand alone digital audio players.

Read on in the full article.

Hey Rafe and Steve.
I love your site and the reviews.
The review is very well..nice work

Check out my site: symbianworld.de.vu

[mudstuff]

Great article Rafe.

Something I would also be interested to hear is bitrate - what can the N95 support and what is the best compromise between quality and storage space? Also, which format do you think is best for audio?

I generally use mp3 as this is what I typically playback on my PC and on other devices so I usually just drop the same mp3s on my phone. Some mp3s I have ripped from cd in very high bitrate however, so usually compress these a bit for mobile - usually 128kbps.

I would also like to know more about the video playback of the N95 and again, bitrate support - what is a decent bitrate for the device and what is too high. Have Nokia done a tech spec which tells you max video and audio bitrates??

A lot of what is detailed in this article also applys to video - connectivity, accessing and playing the content on the phone - but I would love a bit more indepth information on this and perhaps other media players such as SmartMovie. I get my N95 next week and would like to start preparing content for it so would really like to know what it can handle.

Thanks for the article.

[imdaShiy]

What's the difference between the Stop and Pause buttons? In most MP3 players today, there is only one of the two, no point in having both I think...

[Rafe]

The stop button stops the music and takes you back to the beginning of the track, the pause button stops the music and will then resume it. Yes the stop button is strictly necessary as the same effect can be achieved by pause - backwards... That said it does makes sense for some (i.e. listen to the whole of track etc).

I'll look into the bit rate stuff and get back to you. As I recall the supported bit rates are quite high for audio. Off the top my head officially its 320 ish for mp3 512 ish for aac. In practise it may be higher. Personally I think 128 for MP3 128 or 96 for AAC is ok or 96 or 64 if AAC+. Though the majority of my music is 128 in MP3 or AAC+

We'll be covering video in a separate review, I'll try and take your requests on board. And yes a lot of this article is applicable to video so we wont necessarily go into the same detail (on UPnP for example). But by contrast TV-Out is much more useful for video (and frankly I imagine most people would use this rather than UPnP).

symbianworld.de.vu - nice site and thanks for linking back here

as a music player? 1 hours? 10 hours? It would be a good test if you all could put some music on and just let it run...

[Rafe]

We're talking in the region of 10 hours or more. However its not that simple since it will be different depending on whether you used Bluetooth, speakers, headset etc. Also have visualisation on and the screen on will make it lower.

Music isn't terribly processor intensive so the battery life is good. Its the other stuff (GPS, WiFim 3G) which will run it down more.

Did you try out PocketOgg on the N95? I never owned a Symbian phone, so I am wondering how good the integration is with PocketOgg. Can you easily make it the default music player?

Also I heard that the video player only supports a limited set of codecs. Are there replacements similar to PocketOgg that you have tried out, especially with the TV out?

Is there not also a volume up/down on the remote unit? It looks like there are some additional buttons on the side there?

Cheers

Hi - is the Audio Quality when playing MP3`s better than the Nokia N80 or Nokia N91?
in particular, the volume output.. nice an loud?
my old N80 and SE W810i just werent loud enuff :-(
but then my old N91 had incredible sound through headphones and plenty of volume..

thoughts?

[mudstuff]

Thanks Rafe, look forward to you answering more questions on video. Thanks for some info regarding audio bitrate.

As for some of the other questions, there are apps like smartmovie with which you have an expanded set of video formats that you can playback such as divx/xvid.

thecreativelifeblog.com tested the battery life for video which came in at just over 3.5 hours in offline mode and audio playback was over 10 hours. I would have thought that radio would be better still as it would be less intensive on the phone.

Basically the phone should withstand a day of heavy use and 2-3 days of general or easy use.

Great review - thanks.

I saw somewhere that Sandisk recently announced a 4Gb MicroSD card. Any idea whether the N95 will be able to support it when it becomes widely available?

Hi. Can you have a review about the Nokia N95's 5 megapixel camera? thanks

[Rafe]

No you can't make PocketOgg the default player. I imagine the developers may look at this in the future. It does work as a solution, but its not ideal. Then again I think .ogg users will probably be OK putting up with this because they tend to be more technically minded.

I though I had mentioned volume controls, but yes they are the button of left hand side.

I honestly have difficult telling the difference between these devices. I think the N91 was very good, but I can't do a direct comparison. The volume issue due to EU regulation is still there, but a good set of headphones can solve this. It's been OK for me (I've been using around 60% volume).

I'm trying to get confirmation of the 4GB cards. they are SDHC cards and although I have seen a report these work there's nothing official yet.

The camera is next on the review list. Should be late Monday / early Tuesday.

Great write-up! It's really nice to see that when a respectable web site gets a free N95 they really take the time to review it right and share with the community.
Unlike some *cough Darla Mack cough* who get their free phone, throw up a crappy unboxing video and then never mention it again.
I'm happy that not everyone abuses the system. Keep up the great work!