The USA N95 and how they fit in the thicker battery

Hurrah, they're finally getting it and giving their high end smartphones larger batteries!

Let's hope this isn't a one-off... I'd love to see at least the option of larger batteries on all future models (although obviously you'd need a new back cover so the bigger battery could fit).

Lets just hope that these options are available in my part of the world too... especially the RAM and the battery.

Wouldn't it have been great if RAM in phones were upgradable as easily as they are in PCs? Or an option of a paging area, i.e. a portion of the memory card which the phone can use as RAM. This option is available in windows' PCs too. This would have really allowed us to use our 2GB / 4 GB cards more efficiently. 😊

I've replaced my T-Mobile Nokia N95 battery with a cheapo one that cost �5.99 and it is giving me 50% more time between charges. I Recharge at 3 bars, and the phone is taking 48 hours now to get that low.

I consider myself a reasonably intense user, I use Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, Mail and browsing regularly.

The trick is to make sure that when you have finished an online session, the 3G two way icon, or the Wi-Fi connected icon has disappeared. Sometimes they have a habit of sticking around, and if that happens you get a warm phone and a drained battery.

I avoided the N80 because of its size and I would not sacrifice the compactness of the N95 for a nominal amount of battery life.

"Wouldn't it have been great if RAM in phones were upgradable as easily as they are in PCs?"

The problem is that PCs have huge amounts of space to spare, in fact the average desktop PC is mostly empty space to allow room for upgrades. Phones are ultracompact with every single component carefully designed to use as little space as possible, so they aren't the kind of things that a user could easily poke about it. I doubt there's any spare space at all within most phones.

"Or an option of a paging area, i.e. a portion of the memory card which the phone can use as RAM. This option is available in windows' PCs too."

Using flash memory on the memory card would slow down the computing side though as it's much slower to put data in and out of flash memory than normal RAM. I had a PC with 256mb of RAM which used the HDD as virtual RAM, and it was very slow whenever using a memory intensive application. Once I upgraded the PC to 512mb, the speed was much faster and the HDD no longer had to be accessed all the time.

If flash cards acting as RAM were the answer, phone makers would just go down that path and we could have up to 1 or 2 gigabytes of RAM per phone. They haven't though, because they know that proper RAM is the only proper answer. If the extra RAM on the US N95 works without any problems, hopefully that will convince Nokia to include higher levels of RAM on all new S60 models in the future.

Utterly ridiculous to do away with the camera protective shutter, imo. As Steve predicted would happen, my battery usage with the BL-5F is fairly reasonable now I've settled into a normal day-to-day routine.

"The problem is that PCs have huge amounts of space to spare, in fact the average desktop PC is mostly empty space to allow room for upgrades. Phones are ultracompact with every single component carefully designed to use as little space as possible, so they aren't the kind of things that a user could easily poke about it. I doubt there's any spare space at all within most phones"

Krisse, I agree. But if you look at notebooks, they have everything packed in pretty tight too and are still upgradable as far as RAM goes. My suggestion was not for provision of extra slots to add RAM, but a facility to replace the existing (say) 16 MB RAM stick with a 64 MB RAM stick. Atleast in PCs/notebooks the RAM sticks are of the same size physically, whether its 256 MB or 2 GB. So logically replacing RAM sticks should not be a problem - provided the RAM slot is easily accessible.

i'm really lookin forward to future phones ..
Finally Nokia has got the Point of Power users and gives us a better battery and more RAM .. FINALLY!

Hopefully this wasn't the last smart move ..

Well, I've seen some speculate that the bad network coverage in the US is a drain on the battery, and that this could be the reason they introduced the bigger battery to the US model. Not sure if there is any truth to this at all. Interesting theory anyway.

If it is true, I am not sure if the US N95 can be taken as a sign of "from now on Nokia will have large batteries".. Furthermore, they did have to go through a number of changes to make it fit, leading to new compromises (i.e. lack of camera shutter cover and apparently slightly thinner, i.e. potentially more fragile or creaky, casing). So I suspect this cannot be taken as a sign of things to come in all cases. Each and every phone is ultimately a compromise among various factors.

Hopefully the RAM addition is there, and that could indeed be a new trend, as price of RAM must be falling and as we have seen N76 and E90 include a lot of ram.

I think this depends on where you live ..
i'm experiencing this here in Austria, i have to say we're pretty good covered with 3G and even HSDPA, but on landsides it's a permanent switch between GSM and 3G - and this can indeed drain your battery faster ..

The best Thing to do (that's how i managed it): The N95 is one of the first Nokia Phones, that can switch between GSM and Dualmode without reboot. i have my 3G switched off all time, until i wanna browse around the net or download stuff etc - this solution keeps me quite satisfied .. 😎

Hi all,

A bigger battery and more Ram are obviously a good thing and welcome but taking away the lens cover would seriously concern me. Once that gets scratched that it's for your qaulity pictures until you get it replaced of course and i can't imagine that would be either quick or cheap.

Marc