I’ve come to a realization that I was looking for the wrong things in the N95 I’m reviewing for three weeks. It’s not a computer, it’s a camera phone. With that in mind, I find myself enjoying the device much, much more.

See, for the last 12 months I have been using my AT&T 8525 which is a crappy phone, but a terrific mini-computer. I have tailored my usage of the device to its features. The 8525 has a QWERTY keyboard, a large screen, a (relatively) fast processor and lots and lots of Windows Mobile apps. Since it’s tailored for the enterprise, the device has great email support as well. The phone aspect of the 8525 is terrible: dialing works poorly on the touchscreen, bad antennae means poor signal quality, bad speaker and microphone and touchscreen activation with my face during calls.

I don’t think that the N95 was designed to compete in the smartphone space. I doubt that many would trade in their Blackberry for this device. On the flip side, there’s a lot of consumers who want a good voice phone with a great camera and small size. Nokia has tailored the device to this audience. I have really poor cellular service at my house, yet the N95 somehow gets a signal where many phones would not. The camera takes terrific shots and somehow corrects my wobbly hand. Combine the camera with Zonetag and you have cool geocoding and Flickr uploading.

One last note is about the browser… it’s great! I have been replacing my “computing” via apps with the Symbian browser. Pages are rendered just like a desktop browser with Javascript and all. For example, I find that it’s much quicker and easier to use webmail than to setup IMAP access to my work mailbox wit the phone. It’s based on the WebKit project.