The Nokia N96 has been official unveiled, with an expected release of late 2008.

As expected, it’s very similar to the N95 line. The big difference is that it has 16GB of internal memory AND a microSD slot. Full details and specs can be found on All About Symbian.

(via The N95 Blog) Nokia has finally granted access to their new N-Gage system, but it’s currently only available for N81 phones. If you have an N81, just head to their site, download the 6 meg package and give it a shot.

Right now there are three demos you can choose from:

• Space Impact
• System Rush: Evolution
• Creatures of the Deep

I expect we’ll see many more games (and compatible phones) very soon.

We’ve covered the excellent emTube application before, but now YouTube has released their first official mobile application.

Using this software you can view any video on YouTube, watch your subscriptions and playlists, and even upload directly from your phone.

The only major downside is that it’s available for a very limited number of phones.

• Some Nokia Series 60 phones like the 6110, 6120, E65, N73, and N95
• Some Sony Ericsson phones like the k800 and w880

That’s it. Pretty small list, but I expect it will expand as time goes on. If you have a compatible phone, point it to m.youtube.com/app and let us know what you think.

As reported by All About Symbian, Nokia has officially unveiled the US version of the 8GB N95.

It will be available sometime in the first quarter of 2008, for an estimated price of $749.

Read the rest on AAS, or you can read the official press release from Nokia.

According to AllAboutSymbian, version 15.0.015 of the Nokia N95 8GB firmware has been released.

Early reports show very few new features, but quite a few speed improvements:

• Gallery and search are now much faster.
• Access time to use the internal 8GB memory is much improved.
• A bug fix for the problem that prevented some third party themes from working.

There’s likely some other enhancements in there as well, but that’s what we’ve got so far.

Now if we could get a firmware update for the N95-3, things would be great!

Update - 12:27pm EST - 1/3/08

Also included with this update:

• Flash Lite 3 and Flash video with full support — even in the browser!
• WRT (web run time). This allows you to load widgets to your phone in a manner that looks like normal S60 applications. Nice!

The Nokia N95 Blog has a review of all of Nokia’s new hardware for 2007. The list includes:

• 5700
• 6110 Navigator
• 6120c
• E51
• E5li
• E65
• E90
• N76
• N77
• N81
• N82
• N93i
• N95
• N95 8GB

It is indeed a very impressive list. They make the case that it was the best year ever for Nokia in terms of great new hardware, and I certainly can’t argue with that.

Into Mobile has confirmed that the 8GB N95 will be coming to North America, and it looks like it might be as soon as mid-January! Very cool.

JustAMP Blog has a nice comparison of the Sony Ericsson W908C and the Nokia 8600. The article is light on info, but it has a lot of nice photos comparing the two.

IntoMobile has some pics and info about the upcoming Asus M930W. It looks capable of competing with the Nokia E90, but more info will be needed before we can say that for sure.

It’s unknown whether or not it’ll have a GPS, and the internal screen looks pretty small. Other than that, it’s a pretty nice looking device.

This comparison has been done on other sites, but I feel I’ve got more to add. I’ve been following the iPhone for quite a while and came close to getting one. However, as I’ve said before I use an N95-3 as my current phone. As a result, I know a lot of the differences between the two phones and I’ll share them here.

I’ve heard two good quotes used when comparing these two phones. The first is “The iPhone is for viewing content, while the N95 is for creating it.” I find that to be a pretty good statement. The iPhone is a great device for consuming content — a superb web browser, great e-mail support, quick links to stocks/weather, etc. The N95 isn’t quite as good at those tasks, but with some help you can post directly to blogs, add videos directly to YouTube, post photos directly to Flickr, post workout information to Nokia’s SportsTracker site, etc.

The other statement I’ve heard is that “The iPhone is made for two hands, while the N95 is made for one hand.” Again, I agree completely. The iPhone is tough to use with one hand for a few reasons. First, it’s a soft keyboard; you can’t feel the buttons since they don’t really exist. Also, you have a QWERTY keyboard much of the time, which lends itself to two hands.

On the N95 side, you don’t even have the option of using a QWERTY (outside of an external bluetooth device). The phone is made to sit in your hand and use your thumb for typing on the keypad.

Shortcomings

Both phones have a handful of shortcomings. The iPhone has five big ones:

• No GPS. Given the slick Google Maps implementation, it’s quite a letdown. However, their reasoning was to conserve battery life, which I can see.
• No 3G support. With their excellent web browser, 3G speeds would have really helped. Again, battery life was the concern there.
• No ability to capture videos. This is just dumb. Why on earth can’t it do this?
• No ability to send MMS (pic and video texts). Again, why can’t it do this?
• You can’t load other software on there - it’s very locked down. They claim this is to ensure the stability of the phone. Given their target audience, I can sort of understand that.

On the N95 there are a few as well:

• No QWERTY keyboard, real or virtual. I like the fact that I can use it with one hand, but when I’m sitting down typing up something, a QWERTY would be real nice to have.
• Small screen. It’s not really that small; in fact, it’s larger than most phones. However, the iPhone screen is much larger in comparison.

Web Browsing

Overall, the iPhone wins this battle. Not only is a nice browser on a large screen with a great interface, but a lot of sites are building iPhone specific versions of their pages, which is great.

That’s not to say that the N95 browser is bad, as it’s quite solid. The other big advantage for the N95 is that you can load any software on that you want, including other browsers. Opera Mini is a very nice (free!) browser that you need to install if you have an N95.

E-mail

This is very similar to the browser situation. The iPhone has a slightly better default setup to handle e-mail, but the N95 allows you to load anything you want. I’ve loaded the Mobile Gmail client on my N95 and I’m thrilled with it. While the IMAP support works well on either phone, the Gmail software allows me to star/archive/etc my items, which you can’t do on the iPhone.

Weather

As with the previous two items, the iPhone makes this easy to use, but tough to improve. You’ve got a big button on your main screen for weather - great! However, if there’s a better weather application that you want to use, you’re out of luck.

The N95 doesn’t have anything built in to handle weather, but there is a variety of software packages to choose from (some free, some not).

Music

The N95 has a very nice music/video player that is included, but let’s be real — it can’t begin to touch the iTunes support on the iPhone. You won’t be disappointed with the music software on the N95, but the iPhone blows it away.

Maps

The iPhone comes pre-loaded with a very nice implementation of Google Maps. However, the N95 lets you download the latest version of Google Maps Mobile, which is even better. Why is it better? Two reasons:

1. GPS. It can follow where you are, and help route you to your destination. The routing needs some work to be on par with devices like TomTom, but it’s not bad.
2. Traffic. You can get live traffic updates on your phone, just like you can with the normal Google Maps. This is very useful. I expect this to come to the iPhone soon, but it’s not there yet.

Main Screen Tweaking

One complaint about the iPhone is that you can’t change the icons on the main screen (hacking aside). The N95 doesn’t give you a ton a freedom on the main screen, but you can change the icons to anything you want.

I assume the reason the iPhone won’t let you do it is because you can’t load any extra software on there, so why bother? Still, it might be nice to be able to put a few oft-used bookmarks on there or something. I like having the N95 main screen show exactly the icons that I want.

The Bottom Line

So which is the winner? It depends who you are. If I had to choose, I’d get:

• An N95 for myself and a few of my friends.
• An iPhone for my wife and a few other friends.

It really just depends on how you use your phone. I love to tinker with the N95 and see what I can make it do (SSH client? Sweet!), while many people (like my wife) would want to use it for web, e-mail, phone, camera and nothing else.

The iPhone has 3G support coming this year, as well as possibly some fixes for their other shortcomings. However, I don’t expect them to completely open up the phone to any software that you want, which means there will always be a place for phones like the N95.