The N96 has a rated battery life of 3.6 hours talk time and up to 220 hours standby time. For Nokia N95, the standby time was rated at 240 hours. So, generally, in all main usage modes (voice, web surfing, etc) you won’t notice much of a difference between these too. On a side note, the Nokia N81, thanks to employing different hardware solutions as compared to the Nokia N95, allowed it to excel in terms of battery time in all primary modes, and score 420 hours on standby tests, which is as close to perfect as it only gets. It takes the N96 a little over 2 hours to charge from empty to full.
The Nokia N96 comes equipped with a DSP for sound and video processing; this way, their presence should boost the handset’s performance on these fronts. Let’s take a look at our battery time chart and see how well it fared in a duel with the Nokia N95 8Gb:
- GPS-navigation – 3 hours
- Video – 4.5 hours (rated at 5 hours, the Nokia N95 8Gb lasted 3.5 hours).
- WEB surfing (over EDGE) – 3 hours (same 3 hours on the N95 8Gb).
- Wi-Fi (non-stop data upload) – 3.5 hours (N95 8Gb – 3 hours).
- Music (in headphones) – 13.5 hours (rated at 14 hours, the Nokia N95 8Gb – at 10 hours)
- TV (only for the N96) – up to 5 hours.
Obviously, the N96’s hardware feats help it stay up in the video and music modes longer while packing a less capable battery. Other than that, it was on a par with the Nokia N95 8Gb (give or take in view of its inferior cell).
In Moscow, the N96 stayed online for around 2 days when we were heavy on its features (regular mail checks, up to 5 hours of music and up to 20 SMS messages). We are confident the phone will easily last 2 days even in the most extreme usage mode (except for non-stop web-browsing), and if you are planning to use nothing but its voice calls, then expect 3-4 days of operation, depending on how much time you spend on the phone.