Ok, so it’s been about a week since I got my Nokia N95, and wow, it’s quite a phone. Before we go on, I should mention that up until recently, I was employed by Nokia (in the ES group, not Multimedia, where N-series comes from). That ended on March 17. Consider yourselves disclaimed appropriately. I got mine at the Nokia Flagship Store in NY. The $750 pricetag, while steep, was certainly far more palatable than the $1300+ that other stores are offering, not to mention prices upwards of $1000 on eBay. At least the eBay prices have dropped closer to the Nokia store’s pricing in the past few days. When I got mine, however, the prices were still sky-high.

The specs are very impressive. Rather than bore you with all of them, here’s the highlight film:

• Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE
• WCDMA on the 2100 Mhz band, with HSDPA
• 802.11g Wifi
• Bluetooth 2.0+EDR
• Built-in GPS – real GPS, not A-GPS
• 5.0 MP digital cam with auto-focus
• Front cam for video calls in 3G areas (i.e. not the US)
• MicroSD expansion slot
• 3.5mm headphone jack
• Dual-slider (slides one way for the dialing keypad, the other for media playback controls)

For the past couple of trips into NY on the train or the bus, I’ve left my iPod at home, in favor of the music player on the N95. It’s a good player, but lacks certain basic features, like the ability to shuffle the tracks in a playlist. Well, either it lacks that function, or I just can’t find it. Either way, if it’s not able to be found, it might as well not be there, right? Otherwise, it works pretty well. Check out the image above to get an idea of what the interface looks like.

The idle screen is pretty much standard S60 v3, with the standard add-ons you’d expect to see – the wifi wizard, integration with the music player, calendar, etc. As usual, you can customize the soft-keys as well as the applications shown in the middle of the idle screen for quick access.

What’s good? Built-in wifi, SIP stack (which integrates with Asterisk with a bit of manual config, or Gizmo with the help of a little application you can get from the Download! application), S60 v3 FP1 browser, IMAP-IDLE support in the mail part of the Messaging app, support for POP3, IMAP and SMTP with both SSL and TLS, as well as every radio under the sun. The 16 million color QVGA screen is quite nice too.

Also included is a new version of Nokia’s “Barcode” application, which is pretty much what it sounds like. It uses the main camera to read barcodes. You can read the barcode in the sidebar of my site with it. So back to the what’s good about it? It actually seems to work this time around. I’ve got Barcode installed on my N73 Music Edition, and while it works, it’s very hit or miss (mostly miss) when it comes to reading a barcode. On my N73, I feel like a bunch of stars and planets need to be aligned, along with some sort of ritual sacrifice to get a successful barcode read. On the N95, that’s not the case at all — it seems to just work. Things that “just work”, as always, make me happy.

Speaking of just working, iSync. While the N95 isn’t directly supported by iSync, there are 2 sources for plugins to make it a “just works” affair. Nokia has made some plugins available, but I chose instead to go with the plugins from the UK-based S60 Themes site, as their plugins work for a wide variety of devices, not just a 1-plugin, 1-device model, like Nokia’s plugins seem to have done. And as always, PC Suite works as well.

What’s not so good? No US 3G bands (850 & 1900 Mhz), battery life, lack of shuffle features in the music player, very slow GPS lock-in. How bad is the battery life? If all I do is make a few calls and leave my mail connected over either EDGE or wifi, I get a bit over 24 hours. If I mix in some web browsing on top of that, just about a day. Throw in a few hours of time on the music player, and I get about 12 hours total. It ain’t pretty kids, but it’s also not the ugliest I’ve seen.

I was also disappointed to find that while my N95 (and N73 for that matter) both work with my Garmin Nuvi 660 GPS for hands-free calling & caller-id display, they do NOT allow the contacts database to be accessed from the Nuvi. Bummer there.

If you don’t need the wifi and/or GPS, go for the N73 or N73 Music Edition. You’ll save a few bucks, get better battery life, give up a bit of screen size, and have 3.2 MP instead of 5. And you’ll keep a few hundred bucks in your pocket.

Let’s jump into the wayback machine to this time last year.. I made 10 predictions for 2006. Let’s see how I did. Last year, I hit 65% correct. Hopefully, I’m improving.

1. Tiered pricing on the iTunes Store – Didn’t happen. And the way things look now, don’t expect to see it happen. I missed this one.

2. HD DVRs will drop to more affordable prices. – I’m torn here. The TiVo Series 3 not withstanding, lots of HD DVRs are now within reach of average folks.. I’m claiming this one.

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So you’ve got a shiny new Nokia E61, E70, N80 or something like that, and you want to connect it to your Asterisk server, eh? No problem. This is an update to an old blog posting. What’s updated? Now it covers the recently released PR3 software for the E-series devices.

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