The Nokia N95 was a high point for Symbian, but as we noted in our previous Flashback article, its success was never replicated. It was also the end for this form factor – the Swiss army knife slider phone.
The original N95 came in early 2007, followed a few months later by the much-improved N95 8GB.
Our destination for today’s story is the N86 8MP, but we have to take a twisty path to get there.
2007 also brought the more affordable Nokia N81.
It launched in two versions – one with basically no built-in storage but with an included 2GB microSD card and one with 8GB of built-in storage but no microSD card.
They were priced €360 and €430 before taxes, respectively. For comparison, the Nokia N95 8GB was €560 before taxes.8GB was quite big for the era, when the original iPod launched in 2001 it had 5GB memory and was advertised as having “1,000 songs in your pocket”.
So, the N81 8GB could keep dozens of CDs of music and plenty of photos too.Not that the phone had a particularly good camera, a disappointing 2MP sensor (no AF) with LED flash and 320p @ 15fps video recording.
That was nothing like the 5MP camera with Carl Zeiss optics and 480p @ 30fps video that the flagship Nokia N95 had to offer.