On the face of it Nokia’s N96 seems like a device that does pretty much everything. Unfortunately it’s handicapped by pathetically miserable battery life (you’ll be charging this bugger at least once a day in all likelihood) and for some reason your text message inbox doesn’t display the date/time when messages arrived (like my old N73 did).
It doesn’t stop at the batter life though. Sadly BBC have seen fit to also cripple the N96’s iPlayer. The N96 comes with everything, headphones, a car charger and even an RCA cable to let you connect your phone to your TV and watch videos on your TV. Which is great – except the iPlayer’s DRM prevents the video from being sent over the video-out line. WHHHAAAAT?!
I don’t know, it’s like they want people to download their shows from BitTorrent instead! At least that way you can do what you like with it once you have it.
In their defence, I guess it’s because it would make it possible to plug the TV-out cable into a PVR (or video recorder if you so wished) and record the programme without any DRM restrictions on it and retain it for as long as you want, but if someone’s THAT keen I’m sure they’ll find a way anyway.
The verdict? Swing and a miss!
