Imagine you just bought yourself a shiny $750 N95. First thing after unboxing it, you'd take a nice good look at the hardware, every side, from nave to chop, front to back, top to bottom. Likewise, we'll start our hands on of the N95 with a guided tour of the phone's beefy hardware. It's a nice phone, but it is big and it feels cheap at times.

Check out the gallery for a tour and hit the jump for more details about what went right, and what went wrong.

It's fat.

OK, let me qualify that statement. It's smaller than the N93, and it's length and width aren't bad, but it's thicker than mostly any other modern phone without a QWERTY.

* Length: 99 mm
* Width: 53 mm
* Thickness (max): 21 mm

And the plastic feels cheap. It isn't up to the build quality of an aluminum Moto or Sony Ericsson. Delving into the usage scenario, the thing is powerful, with a 5MP camera, a true GPS receiver, loud speakers, a fairly bright autodimming 2.6-inch 320 x 240 pixel screen. I mention all this because battery life is abysmal: 4 hours of talk and 10 days of standby? Try one day of standby with sporadic usage. Phil Torrone recommends a mintyboost battery pack. More complaints that aren't Nokia's fault — the video call camera obviously doesn't work without US carrier support, and the HSDPA high speed data band runs at 2100Mhz, which is Euro spec. So, you're stuck with EDGE and, thankfully, the excellent WiFi 802.11B/G implementation. (Which supports uPNP streaming to other devices on your network.)

Some more errata: Button presses are fairly 'ok', the media playback buttons need more tactile feedback. and there's an honest to god headphone jack on its side.

That's about it for hardware.–Brian Lam

Nokia N95 [Gizmodo]

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