[Note: Pictures pending, I need to retake them]

A few months ago I bought an unlocked Samsung BlackJack II on eBay, and shortly after receiving it I was ready to dump it. In a word, it was crap. It was awfully slow, had a painfully laggy keyboard, didn’t have very good battery life and it picked up fingerprints like nothing else. It was genuinely hopeless, and after a month it made it’s way back onto eBay and out of my life forever.

I went back to my trusty N95 8GB, which had served me faithfully for several months, perfect for me in every way except one: the keyboard. It had an excellent number pad, but I despise using T9, I’m not terribly good at it. I like to have a key for every letter, that’s how I roll. I wanted a smartphone with a thumboard again, but nothing on the market suited. Windows Mobile seems to have lost the plot somewhere, Sony Ericsson’s UIQ devices are old and outdated, and the only Nokia available in a similar form-factor to the BJII was the E61i, which is too wide, ugly and old. Was is the operative word in that sentence, because the phone that I have wanted since I first read about it has been released, and I have since passed the N95 8GB onto my sister as I won’t be needing it anymore.

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Over 6 months ago I reviewed Nokia’s flagship phone, the N95 8GB, which I thought was fantastic. It was essentially a refresh of the N95 (which I wasn’t enamoured with), fixing the built quality, battery life, and a few other niggly little things that turned me off. Since then the N95 8GB has been my main phone. I was surprised to find myself switching back to it after less than a month of owning the BlackJack II, that’s how much I liked it.

Over the last week I’ve been using the N82, which is basically an N95 inside a candy-bars body. It has a few other hardware tweaks, but is otherwise the same feature-set, which to be honest is a very good thing. The N95 has almost every radio available (HSDPA, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS and FM) and an excellent camera, all features shared with the N82.

But it was never the feature-set that bothered me about the N95, it was the case that they were packed into, and I find myself having some concerns with this new model…

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As they say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! Being a geek that doesn’t tend to enter my mind when a new firmware for one of my devices comes out.

In my defence, the v20.0.016 firmware for the Nokia N95 8GB added auto-rotate functionality, something I wanted (at the time anyway) since surfing in landscape is great, right up until text needs to entered. Auto-rotating would make it a lot more convenient!

The upgrade went smoothly, and after loading a few apps (Mail for Exchange, Opera Mini, Gmail and Windows Live Messenger) and entering my Exchange settings, my phone was back in business, with the auto-rotate support! But, the firmware seems to have a very irritating bug that makes me wish I hadn’t touched it. While Judie has been fixing problems, I’ve picked up a very irritating one.

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