The Nokia N96 is all about multimedia, it seems. Yes, beneath the exterior lies a very capable (if slightly buggy) S60 3rd Edition FP2 smartphone, but look at the advertising for it, examine the specs and unique selling points and you quickly arrive at the conclusion that this is something of an ultimate extension of the Nseries 'multimedia' concept:

• hardware decoders for video and audio
  
• kick stand for video watching
  
• extra front panel media controls
  
• side-mounted loud stereo speakers
  

Plus the usual Nseries top photo specs, of course. But how does it fare in real life? I'm going to look at each multimedia area and try to assess any N96's superiority over its predecessors and contemporaries.

 Stills photography

The N96 has, on the face of it, the same Carl Zeiss-lensed camera as the N95 and N82, I suspect, but the software algorithms do vary between the different devices, resulting in subtle variations in photo file size, digital noise and colour variation. Below are a couple of sample photos, click on each to download it or view it full-size.

As you perhaps might expect, the N96 has the very latest camera software in it and as a result the balance between file size, noise, edge enhancement, light sensitivity, and so on, is almost perfect. 

What's not perfect, of course, is the exposed nature of the camera lens glass. As on the N95 8GB, this exposure to scratches results in an ugly look after a while and slight flaring when filming in sunlight, even though I proved that most photos aren't significantly affected.

Evening shots are helped by the presence of dual LED flash rather than single, although it's still a way short of the excellent results from the N82's flash. See here for my direct testing of dual LED flash versus its rivals.

It's also worth mentioning (again) the odd shutter key on the N96 - you have to press it a fair way before focussing takes place and you have to press it in a long way and with significant pressure in order to take a shot. Maybe this was an attempt to prevent accidental camera activation in the pocket or in a car holder? 

Image viewing and organisation is handled by Photos, a new application for Nseries under S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 - see Rafe's multimedia look at the N78 for more detail on this, plus screenshots. And Share online is also present and correct, for firing your snaps off to Flickr or Ovi.

 Video recording

Prepare yourself for a disappointment. I was expecting similar video recording quality to the N95 8GB, but what I found was hazy, defocussed footage, as you can see for yourself below. Under controlled conditions, I shot the same clip with N96, N93 and N82. Click to download or open up the combined MP4 file (40MB) in your chosen media player.

In case you don't want to grab the video, there are three problems here. The most trivial is the unprotected camera glass, which will have a slight detrimental effect on video quality as time goes on and the glass gets smudged or scratched. Next is the dramatic audio gain control. The default seems to be very 'high', so each recording starts with a bucket load of hiss. The aim here was presumably to catch both whisper quiet people and loud rock concerts without really messing up either, but I think there are still some software tweaks to be made by Nokia here.

Most serious though is video picture quality. Here are comparable sections from screen grabs from the N96, N93 and N82 sections of the video:

As you can see, the N82 footage is crystal clear, and really quite remarkable considering none of these phone cameras focusses in video mode. The N93 footage has more colour and contrast but isn't quite as clear, while the N96 footage (on the left, above) appears blurry and indistinct. I'm hoping that video picture quality is fixable in firmware, otherwise this will end up being a huge black mark against the N96.

Annoyingly, as some commentators have observed, the move to Video Centre (and Photos) for handling multimedia has meant that some functions have gone missing - chief among them is that you can't edit your new videos anymore, you can't even them trim them to length. This is a huge come down from the sophisticated video editing in the N95 and I'd dearly love to see Nokia put some of this goodness back in.

 Music playback

With the dedicated audio decoding hardware, I was expecting something special from the N96 - and I got it. After booting, I left Music Player working through my Gigabytes of music, playing rock music into my third party over-sized headphones. It managed 15 hours non-stop playback, which I'd be quite happy with - interestingly, Nokia only quote 14 hours, and in offline mode, whereas I had the device on 3G the whole time. It certainly seems as if the extra electronics help eke out the battery life.

I loaded up about 10GB of music tracks and quick matching of search text in the music library was fast enough - not instant, but good enough for that volume of music. Audio quality was excellent, but then it's also excellent on most other recent smartphones... Audiophiles won't be disappointed here anyway, provided their music is encoded at a decent bit rate.

The external playback controls work well, although as previously noted they're often illuminated when music or media isn't playing or loaded, which is a tad confusing. I was also put out when Music player found something it didn't like in my 16GB Mass Memory disk and refused to load any music whatsoever, being stuck on 'Opening'... - I had to reformat the entire thing and reload my music from my desktop.

Both these issues are firmware-related, I suspect, and we'll see many future 'easy' over-the-air or NSU firmware updates from Nokia for this, their new flagship.

Also of note on the music front are that Internet Radio is built-in: you get a choice of whether to fire up the internal FM receiver or the Shoutcast-based Nokia utility when you click on 'Radio'. Internet Radio is available for almost all other S60 phones, so I won't go into detail here, suffice to say that it's slick, works well and only produces a handful of broken stations (of the 100s listed).

There is also, of course, Nokia's Podcasting utility and Music Store, as featured on all other recent S60 phones. Plus UPnP functionality - see Rafe's write-up of this in his N78 review (again) if you want to know more about UPnP.

 Video playback

I've talked a lot in part 1 about how BBC iPlayer came along at just the right time for the N96 and makes the difference between a disappointing handset and something interesting. It's hard to overstate this, especially since much of Nokia's advertising is based around its iPlayer compatibility.

I've covered iPlayer itself in the Applications section, suffice it to say that playback of downloaded (encrypted) programmes from the BBC works quite well. Once or twice, I had crackles on the soundtrack, but these went away after a reboot. Stopping and starting a programme had the N96 in trouble as well - if you interlace general phone use with catching up with something.

iPlayer is a Web Runtime widget and doesn't come in the N96's firmware, interestingly. So if you hard reset it for any reason (coping with buggy firmware glitches springs to mind) then you'll have to pop back to the BBC's iPlayer page manually. Installation is thankfully painless and the device is recognised first time.

Also of note is that if for any reason (cough.... buggy firmware..... cough) you decide to wipe your N96's 'Mass memory' then your licenses also get zapped, as shown below. No big deal when they're just iPlayer downloads - hey, it's only TV at the end of the day - but it's yet another example of all that's wrong with media and DRM... see other rants from me on this over at www.i-hate-drm-no-really.com.... If these had been purchased videos from a Nokia Video store then I'd have been really cross...

Playback of general video files was also a little worrying with the current v11 firmware. Compatibility is good, with WMV and MP4 and 3GP files of all varieties being recognised and played properly. Unfortunately, the general stability of the firmware means that videos tend to crash the phone every now and then, seemingly randomly, which is more than a little disconcerting.

Still, crashes not withstanding, the N96 managed to play WMV and iPlayer videos for just under 5 hours continuously, on default screen brightness, roughly what Nokia quote in the N96's specs, and well over three hours on maximum brightness, which was quite impressive for something with this small a battery. (Imagine what the N96 could have done with the 6650's 1500mAh unit!)

One major annoyance is that while skipping through videos, the key to use is the (light up) 'next track' one. What Nokia would like you to do is give this a long press to fast forward through footage. Unfortunately, if you absent mindedly just give it a short press, perhaps intending to only nudge the playback point forwards a few seconds, you end up being thrust into the next video clip. Ditto for rewind and the previous clip. Yes, my fault for not using the keys properly, but it quickly started to get annoying. How often are people going to want to jump to the next video from halfway through the current one? Surely the key behaviour should be modified here?

 Verdict

The Nokia N96 sees itself as the pinnacle of the traditional Nseries line, but like all the other devices in the series it's going to take a lot of work by Nokia if it's to reach anything like its potential. The video capture and playback problems are all relatively major in my view, seeing as these are primary functions of the N96, and it's going to take at least a couple of updates to fix them.

The potential is there though: if everything on the N96 worked as advertised, with no random freezes, glitches or crashes, then (despite the battery size) we'd have a winner on our hands - the hardware media decoders are a significant help and, one day, maybe the DVB-H TV receiver will come in handy, too (in the UK). Who knows? Until then, the N96 is one to watch, but only actually to buy if you enjoy being something of a beta tester for Nokia.

Steve Litchfield, All About Symbian, 9 Nov 2008