The original Nokia N95 smartphone
The Nokia N95 was introduced in early 2007 as a showcase for all the latest mobile phone technology, including GPS satellite navigation, a 5 megapixel camera, TV Out, 3.5G, a graphics accelerator chip, and various other cutting edge features to make tech fans drool.
All About N-Gage's opinion of the N95 as a gaming device:
Just before writing this article, a phone gaming site posted that there was no perfect N-Gage phone because none of them had landscape mode, gaming keys, motion sensors, wi-fi and TV Out. In fact, the N95 has all of these things, plus it also has a 3D graphics acceleration chip which should work with any future 3D chip N-Gage games, and GPS too for any future location-based games. By that blogger's standards, the N95 is better than the perfect N-Gage phone. How does All About N-Gage feel though?
Well, actually, that sums up our feelings quite well. Though of course no phone is ever perfect, but the N95 does manage to pack a lot of gaming-friendly features into one device. The N95 is an excellent N-Gage phone for all of the above reasons, and the 3D chip and GPS also make it future proof to some extent. However, the thing that makes the N95 work best of all as an N-Gage phone is the horizontal mode, which lets you use the multimedia keys exactly like dedicated gaming buttons:
A rather gorgeous sunset in the N-Gage game Hooked On: Creatures Of The Deep
A surprising number of people still claim you can't use the N95 with N-Gage games in horizontal mode. Well, they're wrong. As you can see from the picture above you most definitely can use it in horizontal mode. Others claim the d-pad is on the "wrong" side, but they're mistaken too. You can flip the game so the direction pad is on whichever side of the screen you prefer (the configuration above is the default one). You can also play in vertical mode if you like.
And yes, we can 100% confirm that the multimedia buttons work with N-Gage games (the middle two buttons are A and B). If it doesn't work on your N95, it may be that you need to update its firmware. This reviewer has used both the N95 and the N81 with N-Gage games for some time now, and there's not much practical difference between their controls. The N81's buttons were hyped as gaming keys, but the N95's multimedia keys are just as good, though you many need to press them slightly differently (and the ridge on the right side of the keys is annoying). The layout of the buttons is perfect if you want to use the N95's TV Out feature to play your games on a television set, because the TV Out cable comes from the side of the phone so you can hold the N95 like a joypad.
Unlike the N81, you can use the N95 in horizontal mode with S60 games too, which makes the N95 a good all-round games machine as well. However, you cannot use the multimedia keys for S60 games (which is perhaps where the N-Gage incompatibility myth came from).
The N95's direction pad works well with games, it's wide enough and sensitive enough to be used very comfortably in long gaming sessions. Its greatest flaw isn't the pad itself, but the proximity of other buttons, especially the menu key and multimedia key which you occasionally find yourself pressing by accident. However, you do learn not to do this fairly quickly, so it's not a huge problem.
The N95's combination of a high class phone with an N-Gage-friendly layout and an excellent sharp screen makes it in our opinion the best N-Gage phone available at the moment. And because it's well over a year old the N95 is now available for a fairly reasonable price, more or less the same as the N81, yet it far exceeds the N81 technically.
If you're in the market for an N-Gage phone right now, the N95 would be our current recommendation. You may also want to consider its cousin the Nokia N95 8GB, which has a larger screen and multimedia/gaming buttons that are raised from the surface slightly. However, we have heard conflicting reports on whether the 8GB version can use its multimedia keys as gaming keys: some people say they can, others say it doesn't work.
REGIONAL WARNING: Nokia's official N-Gage site says that N-Gage currently only supports some versions of the N95 and N95 8GB. Click here to go the N-Gage download page and scroll to the bottom of the screen to see the current compatibility situation. The European versions of the N95 and N95 8GB are all supported, but the Chinese and American versions currently aren't.
Our sister-site All About Symbian's in-depth multi-part review (note that these are reviews of the original N95, not the newer N95 8GB):
Nokia N95 Review Part 1: The GPS Navigator
Nokia N95 Review Part 2: The Music
Nokia N95 Review Part 3: The Camera
Nokia N95 Review Part 4: The Camcorder