Nokia N96 On Vodafone: Big Fail

So the time’s come to upgrade my phone – my Nokia E65 is getting a bit long in the tooth and we’ve been on a rubbish tariff anyway, off to the Vodafone shop I go. I’d sorta contemplated an iPhone but the whole kill switch thing put me off.

Our local Vodafone shop in Wakefield has a useful chap working there who’s given me good advice in the past: a very pleasant gentleman called Gareth. I went in, explained the monthly £200-plus phone bills, and tried some handsets. I must admit, I was a bit single-minded about this: a friend also has an N96 and likes it, and I’ve known quite a few friends with N95s who said they’re OK. To be fair Gareth told me it wasn’t a decent handset for my needs and it seemed a little sluggish in the shop but I put that down to “new setup” and things. Bad bad move, should’ve listened to the Bloke Who Knows.

Some of the more interesting problems:

• It’s slow. I’m not talking about odd bouts of sluggishness, it sometimes pauses for 5-10s and buffers the keypresses so you’ll get a rapid burst of functionality followed by nothing.
• Random reboots. It’s done it twice in the middle of calls, once while using the video player on the stock videos it comes with, and once while using the MP3 player.
• The MP3 player itself seems to be purely a reference implementation of the Fraunhofer decoder – it occasionally skips and garbles on known-good MP3s, and once it’s garbled the only way of fixing it is a reboot.
• Awful camera. Admittedly I didn’t get it for the camera, but to say “ooooh 5MP” then chuck out awful poorly-focused shots isn’t good.
• One fun point on Saturday it decided to not switch on: I was pretty sure the battery had died but once I’d removed and re-inserted the battery itself it came back with a decent charge.
• One word: “power saver”. Utterly useless, looks like the phone has run out of charge which I’m pretty paranoid about since the earlier “don’t switch on” problems.
• No thankyou, I don’t want to share that video on t’Internet. No, I don’t. Really I don’t. Please stop asking me. Please stop trying to upload it. Really. JUST STOP, YOU…
• Downloading S60 apps via the browser causes a system reset sometimes – happened with PuTTY.
• Cheap. Plastic. Feels cheap and plastic, almost like I’d break it if it was at the bottom of my bag.
• And after all that, the keypad is awful to type on – buttons arranged in a format which makes it easy to not send texts, or accidentally cancel things out.

Just to give you an idea of how bad it’s got, I’ve put my SIM back in the old E65. The new handset’s off back this morning, and I’ll probably go for an E71 instead on the advice of People Who Use Phones In The Same Manner As Me.

(So, why do I need to give the E71 a miss? Comments please…!)