Just received my N95-3 and I'm lovin' it!

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Kunmui

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I may have officially been a part of the S60 'community' when I got my E61 last month and the wider Symbian community when I got my 6133 earlier this year, but I'm guessing that most on here would agree that having a current high-end model is what it takes to have 'dove in'.
Well, I basically have little to say that hasn't been said already by countless other folks on here as well as plenty of other places, though I do have a few questions that I don't believe was mentioned here (or may have but couldn't get what I wanted to know out of what I found):
Is there any way I can get a version of firmware that uses UK English as opposed to US English? How would I go about changing the firmware? I do have NSS & have change product codes & re-flashed my E61 before.Does Copy & Paste exist? If so, how do I do it and where can I do it from? If not, is the feature in demand enough to possibly be considered in a future firmware update?I get tiny skips in music playback from time to time. I also got my first crash whilst seeking forward through a 2-hour music file. Is glitchiness like this normal or my OS (v20 or so) outdated (I heard 30 was out but not for NAMs)?About how much battery life should I expect out of the N95-3 when only playing music (MP3s - average 192 kbps) & leaving the device left alone with my headphones plugged in? (3G on but not doing anything as well.)What real-world speeds should I expect at best when surfing or downloading on the device and when using it tethered to a computer?
Thanks all and even though I didn't initially learn about the N95 early last year from here, here is indeed where I began to seriously consider buying one. I'm glad I held out for it. I will however still be using my BB as my primary device for the time-being because it has QWERTY, UMA, very long battery life, JiveTalk, & BB Messenger. I do seem to also like the way the music player functions more on the BB for now (I can play folders and I hate tag-based browsing. My stand-alone music player, an iriver H140 w/ Rockbox installed does that as well, so I prefer this method of browsing & queueing.)

I seem to have none of these nor a substitute to them on the N95-3 & everything else I can do on the N95-3.
 
1) I don't think there is a UK version of N95-3, so probably not

2) Yes, you can copy and paste using the "pen" key. Hold it down and click to mark what is selected, or hold it and move the d-pad to highlight multiple. Then, while still holding, press the appropriate softkey that is marked "copy". Later, hold the pen and press the softkey marked "paste".

3) Yep, that's just the way it is. Especially if you do other things while music is playing. The CPU in the phone, while faster than most Nokias, is still very low powered.

4) I haven't used it for just music with headphones, but in an all-out "torture test", playing a movie on the loudspeaker, wifi, bluetooth etc I can get about 2.5-3 hours max out of it before it dies. In regular daily use I usually still have "full bars" of battery when I get home from work in the evening.

5) I haven't tried tethering (AT&T doesn't allow it with the normal data plan). Downloading on the phone over 3G I usually get around 100kbyte/sec. Wifi between the phone and another local PC on my network goes AT MOST about 650 kbyte/sec. It seems that's as fast as the hardware on the phone goes.

I've never used a blackberry but I am not a fan of the music player on the N95 at all, in part because of the features you mentioned. There are some third-party players but I'm not a big listening-to-music-on-my-phone kind of guy.

I've had my N95-3 since it came out and there are definitely some annoying things, but overall I'm extremely happy and haven't seen another phone that I'd rather have yet. Enjoy
 
Awww.. come on.. tell us the truth now..

Of course I have "never" done tethering either (), but rumors have it that you'll get significantly better performance using the web browser on a tethered computer over the one that comes with the N95. In other words, the data transfer speeds are not the bottleneck, the rendering is.

According to http://www.speedtest.net/ and also http://i.dslr.net/iphone_speedtest.html, I'll get anywhere between 700 kbps (at work during daytime) and 3.0 Mbps (at certain spots on my way home in the evening) over AT&T's HSDPA network.
 
Can I C&P from web pages? E-mails?

Do third-party music players take up more battery power? Also, I get the skipping even when I'm not touching any buttons at all (ie just letting it play). I did a battery test today with headphones plugged in, volume at 100% with a repeating playlist of MP3s, 3G on but idle with the phone sitting in one spot with a great signal & I got 9 h 25 min of continuous playback. Looks like I may need that extended battery...
 
The thing about this skipping that I'm getting is that it happens even when I'm not doing anything in the background. For a device meant to replace an MP3 player it doesn't seem to be doing its job. I now wonder if it can't handle playing 192 kbps MP3s, can it handle recording video at 640x480 in 30 fps like it claims to do?

Heck my BlackBerry 8320 plays music more smoothly than the N95-3 and it's not multimedia-first like the N95 was marketed as. Is the processor on the BB faster than the N95?
 
If there is a way to do that, I don't know it. The copy/paste I was talking about is in editable fields where you can enter text.



The skipping like that is not normal, then. If I play some regular eAAC+ or mp3 files it's fine. The only thing I can think of is maybe your memory card is too slow. I have a Class 6 4gb A-Data brand card in mine and it seems fine.

I can't even imagine listening to music for 9h 25m. My ears would be so sore and I'd be bored of sitting there listening to music. :P Plus the only time I could even get that many hours together is on the weekend, and that's when I catch up on TV If you're going to be in one place while listening, just hook up to the charger.

I'm not impressed by the sound quality with headphones, there is a LOT of background hiss and it bothers me too much so that's why I never use the phone for listening to music.
 
The video is usually okay, but there are hiccups where the video will apear to "freeze", I guess the recording couldn't keep up.

I'd suggest using AAC instead of MP3, the files are a fraction of the size, so there's less I/O to be done when playing. If you already have converted your CDs to MP3 then it's not a really practical solution.



N95 has the fastest CPU of any Symbian phone, I think... but it's still underpowered and it's obvious by the slow rendering speed of web pages, lag when opening menus etc. It does have 3D graphics chip but it's rarely used (and in fact, the N96 has a slower CPU and no 3D graphics chip, so apparently Nokia was happy enough with the performance they thought they could cut back on it for its successor)

Blackberry 8320 has a 312MHz Intel XScale processor
N95 has ARM-based CPU running at 330 MHz

I don't know how MHz between those two processors compares. Comparing MHz of different families of CPU is not accurate.
 
You mention about using AAC & that is an option for some of my stuff (stuff I have in a lossless format that can be transcoded) but doesn't AAC take more CPU power to decode?

About the memory card Classes, how can I check the class of a given memory card? Is there a way to do that? Is getting a faster one likely to clear these issues up?

FYI, I did not actually listen for 9h25, I left headphones plugged in & had the volume turned up to 100% for that time but they certainly weren't in my ears for that long.
 
Well, it seems that this page may have helped the problem somewhat. I formatted the memory card on the N95 in its own OS & then copied all the music back to it to hear less skippage than before. I do get skips still, but about once every 10 minutes or so (vs once every 1 to 2 minutes). Those on here who use their device extensively for music, is once every 10 to 15 minutes normal even when in offline profile or is there likely to still be a problem somewhere?
 
Well the AAC vs MP3 was on the assumption that it's an I/O speed problem and not a CPU speed problem. Although for me it seems encoding to AAC is actually faster than MP3, it takes about half the time to encode to AAC than it does to MP3 (aacplusenc vs lame). I don't know about the decoding part, though. The CPU should be able to keep up with either format easily, really. If I can play 30fps 320x240 video which has AAC audio with no skipping, surely you should be able to play audio-only files of any size and bitrate without skips.

The class of the card should be printed on it or on the packaging. I think the class refers to write speed, but generally speaking I think cards with faster write speeds probably have faster read speeds as well. There's class 2, 4 and 6 and it translates to a minimum speed of 2 MB/s, 4 MB/s, 6 MB/s respectively. Again, though, even the slowest 2 megabytes per second should be plenty fast for a 192kbit/sec mp3.

You could try copying some songs to the internal phone memory and see if the skipping still happens. If it does, then it's probably not the memory card.

Another thing I would think of is if you have any other programs running in the background and using up CPU, but if it's a new phone you probably don't have anything like that.
 
Also, the video in low-light is really slow. Here is a video i did of fireworks at night: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqiE4xdnp5U

you can see how low the framerate got...
 
Well, the BB is GSM, and the N95 is UMTS. So, if you went into settings and changed the phone to GSM network you would get more battery life than the BB. The N95-3 has a 1200mAh battery, which is hardcore for a phone doing GSM only. Give it a try.
 
Do extended batteries with custom doors exist? I have a 2600mAh in my BB 8320 because the standard 1100mAh didn't last me.

Are these phones simply not capable of doing what I want (replacing multiple devices) yet? Is it me that has unusual requirements? Are these devices made for people who, for instance, charge them up daily before they go to sleep?
 
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