Nokia N96

You have to hand it to Nokia – when the company has a new phone on the market, it makes damned sure that everyone on the face of the planet is fully aware of the fact.

Hell, we're willing to wager that there are indigenous tribes living in the depths of the Australian outback that are sick to the back teeth of hearing about the shiny new Nokia N96. So ubiquitous is this latest addition to the Finnish manufacturer's line up that it wouldn't be a massive stretch of the imagination to find yourself holding a conversation with your dear old granny about the phone's finer points.

So full marks go to Nokia's marketing department – but is all this attention deserved?

In terms of raw aesthetics, you'd be forgiven for answering 'no' when you first cradle the N96 in your palm. While it's far from being an ugly phone, it shares one of the more undesirable traits of its ancestors the N95 and N81: it's something of a chunky monkey. With immense vital statistics of 103x55x18mm and a tubby weight of 125g, the N96 looks positively enormous when placed next to the slender proportions of rival phones such as LG's KF750 Secret and Sony Ericsson's W890.

Surprisingly for a phone with such impressive girth, some aspects of the N96's build quality left us feeling rather disappointed. The battery cover creeks like a troublesome floorboard when you grip the phone tightly and the buttons feel spongy and cheap – hardly the hallmarks of a flagship phone. However, such quibbles are mitigated by a solid overall construction and a robust two-way slider mechanism, the latter of which makes the N96 feel like the mobile phone equivalent of a Swiss army knife.

So it would be fair to say that if the N96 were a person it would get up each morning, step on the bathroom scales and pull an indignant expression, but thankfully that bulky torso contains some seriously exciting features. As was the case when we reviewed the N81, it's almost easier to list what the phone doesn't have instead of reeling off a comprehensive spec sheet; needless to say, when the engineers at Nokia were throwing this phone together, the kitchen sink must have been the only thing left on the drawing board.

One addition we found particular intriguing was the inclusion of support for BBC's iPlayer. Although it only works when connected to a wireless access point (the prospect of funnelling all that scrumptious high-resolution video data down a 3G connection clearly wasn't an option) the quality of the footage is remarkable.

Being able to pick and choose which program to watch is incredibly liberating, and this facet of the phone is likely to become indispensable as wi-fi access points become more and more abundant in our towns and cities.

Sadly, although the N96 also features support for DVB-H TV, there's currently no one providing this service in the UK at present – this is almost certain to change in the future and will make the phone even more attractive for mobile coach-potatoes (which we're fully aware is something of an oxymoron).

Surfing the net is also a joyous experience thanks to the large display, fast wi-fi access and excellent browser. The lack of a touchscreen could be raised as a minor criticism, but then this might be down to the fact that we've been proper spoilt recently by the gloriously tactile interfaces of the iPhone and Samsung Tocco.

Elsewhere the N96 improves in the (admittedly few) areas where the N81 was weakest – the camera has been bumped up to a five-megapixel auto-focus variant with Carl Zeiss optics and as you might expect, picture quality is reassuringly decent (close-up photos are especially good). Internal memory is now a muscular 16GB and this can be expanded by another 8GB using a microSD memory card.

With such a wealth of storage space it's unsurprising to see Nokia really pushing the N96 as a music player, and it certainly doesn't disappoint in this regard. Granted, the media player interface isn't anywhere near as swish as that seen on the iPhone, but the inclusion of a standard 3.5mm headphone jack – as well as the possibility of support for Nokia's new and potentially groundbreaking 'Comes with Music' download service – means the N96 has the capability to become a truly fearsome contender in the super-competitive music phone arena.

The phone is also fully geared-up to take part in Nokia's majestic N-Gage revolution. With Apple's iPhone soaking up many mobile gamers with its Apps Store service and Google's Android Marketplace slowly but surely starting to pick up speed, N-Gage has been unfairly pushed out of the limelight somewhat – which is a real shame, because as a gaming platform it arguably works better than its mobile rivals.

The worryingly downbeat nature of N-Gage's current fortunes is made even harder to comprehend when you load up a game on the N96. No mobile manufacturer has made as much of an effort to cater for portable gaming as Nokia. The N81 had dedicated gaming keys but here the company goes one better; the aforementioned dual slider mechanism not only reveals the keypad but also slides downwards to expose an additional quartet of buttons which can be used for both music playback and (more importantly) interactive entertainment.

Couple this with an excellent D-pad and you have a phone that is deadly serious about being seen as a pure gaming thoroughbred. Our review unit came with trial versions of Tetris, Asphalt 3: Street Rules, Snakes Subsonic, Mile High Pinball and World Series of Poker, and all five titles proved worthy of prolonged play. Granted, the games themselves don't possess the visual opulence of the premier iPhone titles but they're certainly a step up from the usual Java-based crowd.

Lamentably, the N96 does showcase some irksome shortcomings. Most annoying is the battery life, which we found to be even worse than that seen in the N95 – and it was hardly as if that particular phone was capable of going the distance in terms of stamina.

If you wish to make use of the N96's numerous advanced features (and let's be honest, you're hardly going to pony up the cash for a phone like this and not use the abilities it's been blessed with) then you it would be wise to carry the charger (and possibly even a spare battery) around with you at all times. A day's worth of BBC iPlayer viewing, MP3 enjoyment and N-Gage gaming will drain the N96's feeble power source faster than Amy Winehouse downs a bottle of sambuca.

Another (minor) bugbear is the operating system. Yes, we're well aware that this is a smart phone, but why does everything have to be so complicated? It's wonderful to have such flexibility but after trawling through the seemingly endless menu structure trying to find a relatively simple command, it makes you yearn for the more streamlined (but less versatile) operating systems of rival 'dumb' handsets.

However, while these issues prevent the N96 from scooping full marks in this review, they fail to spoil the overall appeal of Nokia's latest and greatest. The N96 is clearly trying to be all things to all men, but for once it actually works. Were it not for the emergence of the all-conquering iPhone then this would rank as the most effective example of technological convergence we've seen in a long time. The fact that the N96 is also exceptionally adept at providing a top-rank mobile gaming experience merely solidifies the phone's status as one of the best handsets money can buy.