23 April 2007

It's not necessary 2B perfect 2B famous!

The Nokia N95 is one of the fastest phones in Symbian world at the moment, and it is more than noticeable in working with the phone, UI is even faster than on the N93 that is based on the same chipset. Actually it is noticeable since first boot up, phone boots up in less than 25 seconds and basically it means that you are ready for working or calling after less than 30 seconds which is incredible score for one Smartphone.

Nokia N95 is powered by Texas Instrument’s OMAP2420 which incorporates the PowerVR MBX 2D/3D graphics core and fully programmable VGP vertex processor core licensed by TI from Imagination Technologies altogether with ARM11 332 MHz processor.

So... same as N93, Nokia N95 featuers 3D HW accelerated graphics and OpenGL ES (1.1) support. GPU is based on the PowerVR MBX 2D/3D graphics accelerator from Imagination Technology incorporated into Texas Instrument’s OMAP2420.

With the high end PC market secured by ATI and NVIDIA, PowerVR is now concentrating on the portable market with its latest design, the low power PowerVR MBX which actually became standard for mobile 3D. It had been licensed by six of the top ten semiconductor manufacturers including Intel, Texas Instruments, Samsung, Philips, Freescale, Renesas, and Sunplus.

Also as you may already know, Nokia N95 is the 2nd Nokia phone that comes with preinstalled System Rush game and it’s the really nice way to show you how amazing 3d graphic is this phone capable to process.

So here it is- System Rush on N95, not my type of game by the way, but I’ll give my best ;))

System Rush on the Nokia N95

*click to watch it

Although Nokia N95 and N93(i) aren’t the only Symbian phones which use this technology, it seems that Sony Ericsson P990 as well as M600 or W950i (UIQ 3, Symbian 9.1 based phones) uses light version of the same IT’s GPU altogether with ARM9 processor packed in the Philips Nexperia PNX4008 chip, but the sad fact is that the configuration its quite inferior to the TI’s OMAP2420. To add, as far as I know HTC also produced cell phone with 3D hardware; the HTC Forseer DVB-H TV phone, runs on Windows Mobile 5.0 and uses NVIDIA GoForce 5500 GPU same as Samsung’s SGHP910.

Here are the latest MBX demo screenshots

*click to enlarge

The only bad aspect of PowerVR MBX GPU is the the fact that it supports only DVD like video (640*480 up to 30fps) while the GoForce 5500 provides better video decoding/encoding. GoForce GPUs are capable for real DVD video (720*480 at 30fps or 720*576 at 25fps) encoding which produces smooth, jitter-free, high-quality video.

If you are curious and if you want to know more about Texas’s chipset and PowerVR GPU, just proceed to the following article that provides detailed overview supported with demo screens.

During the testing period I’ve claimed about the weak battery and the low resolution screen as the most important downsides of this phone, but finally something else appeared to be even more important.

Actually, speaking of hardware, the only bad, but really bad point in the awesome hardware specification is amount of free RAM which is around 20 MB after boot up.

Unlike the just announced Nokia E90 that has 128 MB RAM, N95 keeps standard 64 MB Nseries memory module, but after boot up, loading OS, platform and all necessary system processes we lose around 44 MB and situation isn’t as brilliant as it seems on first sight and we have just a little bit more than 20 MB of free operating memory. This becomes main issue and the most important downside of this phone because it has effect on all aspects of this great phone and basically makes multitasking impossible in lot situations.

OK, to be honest, it’s hard to expect 128 MB like on E90, but from other hand, it’s hard to believe that tiny, stylish, mid-range phone like Nokia N76 beats this powerful beast completely in terms of free RAM, it has unbelievable 44 MB of free RAM after boot up and that’s one of the things which I would like to see on N95. Of course, someone will say it’s enough, it has the same amount of RAM as N93, but unfortunately it isn’t. It has more features and more applications which use a lot of RAM. It has improved Safari, 2 millions more pixels to process and 20 MB simply isn’t enough. Nokia didn’t increase amount of RAM and it’s a huge mistake that causes serious problems, especially considering well-known problems with RAM management on the 3rd edition S60 phones.

*click to enlarge

For example, safari fails to load complex pages very often, actually it loads page but without images with ugly memory low pop-up, tabbed browsing is basically impossible and working with high resolution pictures isn’t as good as it should be. Even without single application in the background, gallery applications fail to zoom images more than 50%. Believe me that I have tried everything and there is no way to zoom it to its native resolution which is pretty annoying issue and I guess that you could imagine how it looks like with some nice music in the background.

What’s the point of 5 mpx cam if can’t enjoy in all 5 millions of pixels straight on our lovely phones!?!?? What’s the point of the VGA video recorder if the gallery often fails to play recorded videos and sometimes restarts? Only way to play it is to get more free RAM. What’s the point of multitasking if we can’t run anything while Safari is active!? Shame on you Nokia, I only hope this is the last S60 phone with 64 MB RAM module!!

.:[ Nokia N95 - Technical Specifications ]:.