I loved the N95. I hated the N95. I returned the N95 to the Nokia Flagship Store.

What did I love? The convergence. Extreme Convergence, as Dameon calls it. There was a lot to love about the N95:

  • Great camera (and I mean great – the best I’ve ever used on a phone, nearly standalone quality)
  • Good music player. For a week or two, I left my iPod at home and listened to my N95. It was nice that it had a 3.5mm jack on the side for “normal” headphones. I never bothered with A2DP.
  • Built-in Wifi
  • Played video from the N95 on a TV a couple of times. It was neato.

There was also a fair bit of stuff I didn’t like about the N95.

  • No Access Point Groups – come on, this one’s so easy to implement (and already done in the E-series phones!) and so useful.
  • While the music player worked well, the controls were a bit obtuse, like trying to find the “shuffle” feature for a playlist. You have to actually be playing a playlist before you can tell the device to shuffle it. Seems sort of a ham handed way to do it.
  • Slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow GPS lock-on. We’re talking in minutes here. I wound up picking up a Garmin Nuvi, which locks on in about 15 seconds if I’m not driving when I turn it on. If my car’s already moving, it takes about 30 seconds.
  • Battery life. This was the true deal breaker for me. I just couldn’t take it. If I was actually using some of the device’s potential (not all either!), my battery was out of juice before the end of the day. What was I doing? IMAP mailbox with auto-retrieve over EDGE or Wifi (30 minute sync interval), talking a bit, playing music on the train (1 hour one way), and a bit of web browsing. Maybe a picture a day, on average.

I had shuffled my devices around a bit to accommodate the N95.. My work phone, the E61 is on loan to a friend traveling in Europe. My work SIM migrated to my N73 Music Edition, and my home SIM went to the N95. After the return? I traded in the N95 and left the Flagship Store with an E65, in which my work SIM lives, sending my home SIM back to the N73 ME.

I’ve got an E65 review coming one of these days. It’s probably 90% positive. The other 10% is stuff that will (hopefully) get resolved with firmware updates.