The N95 does everything. That is the pitch, it is accurate, and after a fortnight with the specification sheet I think it is also the problem.
Count what Nokia has put in this thing. A five megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics and autofocus, which is a real camera by phone standards rather than a marketing number. Video at a resolution people will actually watch. GPS with maps. Wi-Fi. Proper 3G. A music player. Two sliding mechanisms, one for the keypad and one for media controls. It is, by a wide margin, the most capable pocket device anybody sells.
It is also thick, heavy, complicated, and its battery struggles to survive a day if you use more than two of the things it does. That is not a manufacturing failure. It is arithmetic. Every capability added to a device draws from the same cell, and Nokia has added all of them.
The comparison everybody is going to make is with the thing arriving in June, and the comparison is more interesting than the usual specification argument, because the two devices disagree about something fundamental. Nokia’s position is that a converged device should converge everything, and that the winner is whoever crams most successfully. Apple’s position, as far as anybody can tell from a demonstration, is that it should do fewer things without making you want to throw it. The N95 has GPS and Apple’s has no third-party software and runs on a slow radio. On any checklist this is not close, and Nokia wins it comfortably.
I have written before that checklists are how this industry keeps score and not how customers experience a product. The N95 is the strongest possible test of that. It is genuinely the most powerful phone ever made and using it involves navigating S60 menus that were designed when the device did four things and now must accommodate twenty. Finding the setting that turns off the thing annoying you is a small expedition.
The camera deserves separating out, because it is not a phone camera pretending. Five megapixels behind decent glass with autofocus produces photographs you would keep, and the video is the first from a handset that does not look like a security recording. For a lot of people that alone justifies it, and I would not argue with them.
What I keep circling is that Nokia has demonstrated it can build absolutely anything and has not demonstrated that it knows what to leave out. Every constraint in a product is a decision, and the N95’s only visible decision is more. That works while the competition is also playing the specification game. It stops working the moment somebody credible argues that the specification was never the point.
Buy it if you want the most capable device available and you are the kind of person who reads a manual. Carry a charger.