“A CLONE THAT IS TRULY WORTHY TO BE CALLED AN EXACT REPLICA! SAME DIMENSION, MARKINGS, FEEL …. OVER ALL CLOSEST TO THE REAL N95 BLACK 8 GIG.”

Looks like a very professional piece of tech-copying, doesn’t it? Detailed right down to the Nokia logo splashed on the front. Those naughty Chinese cloner “gods” have even packaged the phone up with a “Nokia” charger, handsfree earpiece, a 256MB microSD card and a manual. An actual manual. Plus a one-year warranty! Talk about laugh-out-loud.

It’s available in the Philippines, apparently, for just US$161. [RedFerret]

AU: Also sounds very similar to the agreement between TomTom and Vodafone in some European countries. Can’t wait to see this integrated into traffic systems here in Australia

The data sent back from each test car logged the vehicle’s speed and location via an on board N95 handset, this information was then sent to a central control station, which in turn relayed the relevant travel alerts. Nokia are quick to point out that their technology has an economical benefit over similar systems, mainly because it relies solely on technology people already own. Given the soon-to-be ubiquitous nature of GPS enabled mobile phones, we would have to agree with Nokia’s observation. Rest your privacy woes aside; the information sent will be completely anonymous. Nokia seem to be making a big effort in this field, and it certainly sounds like a win, win to us—go ahead and checkout the video at CNet. [CNet]

The size is also new with the N96 being slightly longer and wider but 1.8mm thinner than the N95. A release date is obviously still unknown and since these specs are on the German Nokia site they could change when the N96 finally hits the rest of the world. [Nokia via IntoMobile]

That makes anybody on an N95 open for some cool gaming action. The modified download can be found here. If anybody’s brave enough, I’d love to get your reviews on the experience…

[Finest Fones via Engadget]

The camera’s not as good as the N95’s, but it’s still great. Audio quality is good, keypad is “fiddly”, messaging isn’t as good as a BB or a Windows Mobile phone, solid battery life, no US 3G (yet), and good GPS/FM functionality. In the end, it’s up to you whether you can justify a $550 price tag for a non-touchscreen phone without support for 3G in the US.

AU: I’m waiting to hear back from Nokia on the local price, but I can tell you that when it does launch in Oz, it definitely will have 3G. HSDPA, even.

[Wireless Info]

The Spin A viewer unfamiliar with the N95 8GB might be forgiven for walking away from this ad unaware that the device is, indeed, a phone, rather than Nokia’s souped-up answer to the Archos 605. Yeah, there’s a brief shot of the keypad at the end, but the hype’s exclusively about the media capabilities (”Play movies/play games/play music” sayeth the copy). So goes Nokia’s strategy to get the N95 8GB to filter down to non-geeks— the early adopters went ga-ga over the third-party apps, but the next tier of consumers (Nokia hopes) will be dazzled by the audio, video and N-Gage games. Oh, and note the lack of speaking parts for the actors. Nokia must be going for that vaunted all-in-one international approach—you can be sure that voice-over artists from Malaysia to Mexico will be enlisted to tailor the spot for their home markets. (In fact, here’s an edited version in Italian.)

Counterspin Tough to see how Nokia is going to capture mainstream hearts and minds without offering a serious price reduction on the N95 8GB. Remember, Apple slashed the iPhone’s price pretty early on, despite (debatedly) gangbuster sales to early adopters; the company knew it had to ratchet down the cost-of-entry to reach the fat part of the consumer bell curve. Nokia seems oddly confident that quality alone will convince a new class of consumers to buy the N95 8GB, an assumption that doesn’t seem justified given the legitimate gripes about the phone’s shortcomings (most notably the lack of a QWERTY keyboard). All due respect to the company for its policy of openness toward application developers, but built-in basics are going to be more important to the majority of users.

Mission Accomplished? It’s a little hard to tell what Nokia has in mind for the N95 8GB this year, as the company prepares to go full-bore in North America. Based on its past ads trumpeting the N95 8GB’s third-party apps—ads which were explicit swipes at Apple—Nokia would seem to have the iPhone in its sights. But then why the accent on multimedia instead of productivity tools? What wowed so many people about the iPhone was the ability to access the (*groan*) “real Internet.” The N95 8GB can do likewise, and it even works with Flash. Nokia is going to have to do a much better job of highlighting those features, because few people will want to drop nearly 800 US bucks on a glorified Archos 605 (which retails for well south of US$350). Still, all the handsome hype in the world may not be able to mainstream the N95 8GB—the lack of a QWERTY combined with the lack of a touchscreen is very 2005. (If only this video wasn’t a hoax…)

Hype-O-Meter 4 (out of 10). A gorgeous and clever ad in many ways, but a puzzling message for a US$779 phone looking to break beyond the monied geek elite.

Brendan I. Koerner is a contributing editor at Wired, a columnist for Slate, and author of the forthcoming Now the Hell Will Start. His Hype Sheet column appears every Thursday on Gizmodo.

Read more Hype Sheet

The N95-3 has a 1200mAh battery, which is significantly bigger than the 950mAh battery in the older, non-3G N95. So the 3G battery is definitely affecting the battery life, but the bigger battery is doing a lot to compensate for that.

While the 3G drain is much stronger than EDGE, this implies that there might be even better EDGE performance than on the original. WirelessInfo.com says they may check into this for us.

The bottom line is this:

The new version of the N95 was able to keep browsing over a 3G network for 6 hours 12 minutes. Under exactly the same conditions, the old N95 (using an EDGE connection) was able to keep on browsin’ for 7 hours 15 minutes.

If you think about it, you can probably get 10X more done in the 6 hours of 3G than you can in the 7 hours of EDGE, so in that final hour, when your N95-3 finally craps out, you’ll be justified in kicking back and reading a book for once. [WirelessInfo.com]