First Call: Nokia N95-3

Lookie what just came calling, so to speak, the updated version of the Nokia N95. The N95 of course has been one of the most widely admired smart phones out there, and did fairly well in our own review of it, but that doesn't mean it couldn't use some improvements. Thankfully Nokia thought so too and so has graced us with this slightly updated version that sports US 3G, 128 MB of RAM and a slightly thicker case that accommodates a larger battery. We have to say that we like what we've seen of the handset so far.

Let's start under the hood. One of the biggest issues with the original N95 was the same problem that has plagued various Series 60 handsets for awhile now, lack of RAM. As you can see below the original N95 has only 17.5 MB of free RAM at boot, and once you've launched a RAM heavy program like the web browser and navigate to our site it goes down to 8.8 MB. You can see that if you browse to a few graphics heavy web pages you'll quickly run out of memory, much less trying to run another program at the same time.

Original N95 RAM at boot up	Original N95 RAM with Web running

Now, power users are always complaining about limited resources on smart phones, but this is the kind of problem that effects every day users too. Thankfully the new N95-3 doubles the built in RAM from 64 MB to 128 MB, which actually more than quadruples the available RAM because the operating system doesn't use up any more than it did before. Below you can see that at boot up the phone has over 80 MB of free RAM. Even after we launched just about every RAM intensive program on the phone it still had over 55 MB of RAM free. The days of "out of memory" errors are gone folks! This improvement alone makes the N95 a much more attractive handset, but there is more.

New N95 RAM at boot up	New N95 RAM with program running

Now, extra RAM is nice, but of course the feature this new N95 adds that might be most exciting to those of us in the U.S. is the support for AT&T's 3G network. Nokia has mostly stuck to building handsets that only support 3G on the 2100 Mhz band, which is used in Europe and some parts of Asia. This means that users here were stuck with Edge speeds, which are barely faster than old fashioned dial up. Now though the new N95 gives us access to AT&T's high speed HSDPA network, with theoretical download speeds up to 1 megabit per second. We pointed both of the N95's at Dslreport's speed test page to see how big the difference actually is.

Old Nokia N95 on EDGE	New Nokia N95 on 3G (HSDPA)

As you can see the new 3G N95 was over seven times faster than the older one on EDGE. To see how this translates in a real world test we timed how long it took each handset to load our own web page. The older N95 took 1 minute 4 seconds while the new 3G N95 took only 23 seconds. This will be a huge boon to those who like using the N95's excellent web browser, and in concert with plenty of RAM ensuring the browser won't crash it turns the N95 into one of the best phones out there for browsing the web.

Of course 3G is battery hungry, and the older N95 already had battery issues. Nokia, seemingly on top of it here, has taken this into account as well by packing a larger 1200 mAh battery under the hood, over 25% larger than the older N95's 950 mAh battery. The larger battery does mean that some changes had to be made to the N95's case though, which brings us to the differences on the outside.
From the front there is no discernible difference but turn the phone around and you'll notice that the housing for the camera has changed. Below on the right you see the old N95 with a cover that protects the lens and a flash to the right of it. On the left the new N95 loses the cover and moves the flash below the lens.