Got this phone about 6 weeks ago on the Three network and I’m still finding my way round it. I do know that it’s a fabulous piece of kit, but also seriously compromised, predominantly by the battery but there are other issues. It seems that the capacity for running processor intensive applications on a smart phone has leapt far ahead of the battery capacity required to support them if you are to be confident of retaining sufficient charge to be able to use the device for, what I assume remains, it’s primary function i.e. making a phone call or two. Let’s be clear what we are talking about here, despite having satellite navigation capability you won’t be wanting to head out on to the moors comfortable in this device’s ability to bail you out should things go a little pear shaped, not unless you consider the ‘moors’ to extend no further than a 10 minute walk from a two digit A road. Maybe I’m being a little harsh on Nokia, maybe it’s the Three chip design that makes unrealistic battery demands as I have had other manufacturers phones on their network and their batteries have not been spectacularly long lived and if this is the case then Nokia would not be able to do anything with the design just to accommodate Three. However, there are many reports about the battery issue with this phone and whilst it is already a little chunky in comparison to some of the competition I would certainly I have been prepared to see the form factor expanded by a few mm in all directions if it were to give even a 20% increase in battery life. Given the liability that the battery is, why does it remain an impossibility for Nokia to provide a battery meter that accurately reflects the state of the battery? Useful charge lasts about 24 hours and after anything up to 18 of those hours the meter will still claim to have between 80-100% of capacity as all five bars on the meter are lit, after the first blinks out it will then be another 3 hours or more before the next goes out. So if the phone became fully charged at midnight then at 9 o’clock that evening you might be entitled to think that you have more than 60% battery remaining. Good luck with that. You’ll find the next three bars disappear very quickly over the next 3 hours and if you didn’t charge it overnight then you would find it limping along in the morning on an all but useless one bar and if you had a bit of a lie in then it’s probably comatose. If charging time is anything to go by then the capacity of this battery is maybe as much as 50% more than my old E65 but the performance is worse. Nokia certainly don’t help themselves in this regard with the way certain applications work, or in the case of one of them for me don’t seem to work but keep loading themselves. If you use the music player and stop what you are playing and do something else it remains in memory using juice. I attempted to configure something called Mobile Mail, I guess I have done something wrong as it just sits there saying that it’s trying to create a connection but never acknowledges that it can’t, let alone tell me why it can’t and I can’t find a way into it to attempt to configure it again. That’s bad enough but if you go into the task manager and shut it down, it loads itself again about 15 seconds later. You find yourself forever checking the task manager to see what the device has loaded or you might have forgotten to shut down in an attempt to eek a little more out of the battery. Now that’s about it for what it doesn’t do well, just about everything you find on the phone, and the things I’ve added to it, Opera Mini. Yahoo Go 2.0 and Nokia’s push email client all do what’s expected with little fuss in either use or setup. It integrates very well with my PC and can be managed well enough through Windows Explorer as well as the Nokia PC Suite software which syncs well with Outlook 2007. The other Nokia software for managing music and video on the N95 can be a bit flakey but generally gets there without being too vexing and they also supply utilities to check that the phone software is up to date and that the installed PC software is also the latest version. The video playback seems to be better than the music, which was a little jerky. The satnav facility seems to hold a good fix and the maps look pretty comprehensive though I haven’t given it a good test yet as I seem to have lost my car charger and don’t want it sucking all the life out of the battery before the end of the drive. I’m a sucker for gadgets, bells and whistles and as well as offering the best clarity for phone calls that I’ve had, it is the best gadget as well. Just as an example of the sort of thing I like about this phone’s capabilities is the time I got locked out of the house with my previous phone, I could phone and see when someone was going to be back but didn’t get any answer and that was pretty much the end of the E65’s usefulness. With this one I could have slipped in my Bluetooth headset, hooked the phone up to my wireless network and used the Home Media application to listen to the music and podcasts that are stored on my PC , read my email or browsed the web without incurring Three’s network charges, so instead of fidgeting about for 15 minutes, not knowing how long I was going to be stuck out there, before someone came back I could have happily spent hours there fully entertained. I’m sure there’s something to be said here about attention spans and the need for constant stimulation, if not for society in general then at least for shallow old me, but there is no doubt that Nokia have crammed phenomenal capability into this phone but seem to have just used whatever space was left to fit in the battery without regard to the demands that it would be required to meet.