As you know, AAS's guest Nick Anstee is now well over a week into his 'exclusive' Nokia N96 experience. Seeing as production N96s seem to be a couple of weeks away, this is as close as most of us will get for a while. Below are more thoughts from Nick, along with an invitation.

Nick: "Just some further thoughts on the N96.

I had a day out with it yesterday, took about 60 photos and 4 short Videos, plus surfed the net and checked email every 0.5 hour and watched
a few minutes of video. The battery indicator showed 1 or 2 bars usage all day to the evening, so battery life for me does not seem to be an
issue. In fact, thinking about it, the only time I have had problems with battery life (based on a nightly charge) on any Nokias that I have
owned is when I have had a runaway process running or buttons activated in my pocket etc, so even the very largest battery would not address
that problem.

Since I did a reset and formatted the mass storage the phone has been a different phone, it is fast and responsive with very few glitches. I can
only put this down to using the Transfer application from my E90 and/or inserting the memory card from my E90 which has applications on it.

The photos yesterday were excellent, I was very impressed, the camera response is in a different league from the E90 and the pictures were
amazing even on a fairly dull day. I had problems with the video recording stuttering every few seconds, I was recording onto the Mass
Storage Memory. [This is probably firmware-related, since the N95 8GB's mass memory seems to work fine for video recording - Steve]

I also played with Share OVI and Flickr, I am only just starting to use these.

In terms of MAC support iSync and Nokia Multimedia Transfer work fine, iSync went without a glitch but I have 2 minor niggles with NMT:

1) iTunes syncing defaults to the Micro SD card, there does not seem to be an option to default the syncing to the N96's Mass Storage, the only way I found to do this was by physically removing the Micro SD card to force it to use the Mass Storage.

2) Whe syncing photo and videos, the photos sync fine the first time but it seems to miss the videos, I found if I disconnected and re-synced
then the videos sync fine as well. It seems to download the video data first time but they don't show up until you do the second sync."

If you have any questions for Nick, about the hardware or software in the Nokia N96, please feel free to ask them here in the comments and Nick will do his best to answer them.