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>> Hey everyone, welcome to Prize Fight. I'm Veronica Belmont and this is the show where we match up two gadgets to fight it out to the bitter end. Today we have two phones with a combined hype score that is off the freaking charts.
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The Apple iPhone versus the Nokia N95. Because hey if you've got over 500 dollars to spend on a brand new cell phone, you better pick the one that's right for you. Lets kick off this battle by choosing which phone is the prom queen of the two. Sexiness is up first.
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In terms of sexiness, what can I say other than that the iPhone really slams it out of the park. Oh, boxing references, okay. I mean the iPhone TKOs the N95 in this round. The Nokia has a solid looking phone, but I mean seriously any phone looks like last decades next to the iPhone. It's thinner, it feels lighter too and fits more comfortably in the hand. For this first round, I'm giving the iPhone a 5 and the Nokia N95 a 3.
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Up next is round two, interface, and navigation.
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These phones take very different approaches to interface and navigation. The N95 uses the familiar Simbion interface. You slide out the keypad for dialing and texting, and navigate the menus with the toggle here. And there are a number of soft keys for making selections. To access the media controls, just slide it out in the other direction and here they are. The iPhone is controlled mainly by the touch screen, but there is a home button to take you back to the main menu. As well as some mechanical buttons off on the side. The menus are very intuitive and dare I say fun to use. Keyboard wise, neither is perfect. The iPhone's virtual keyboard takes some getting used to and the N95 shockingly has no core keyboard at all. For this round I'm giving the iPhone another 5 and the Nokia a four.
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Up next is round three, features.
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Both phones are chocked full of features. The Nokia N95 has a five-mega pixel camera, a video camera, GPS capability and an FM tuner. And a great media player that can handle a whole host of formats. Plus there's a 3-point 5-millimeter headphone jack, so you can use whatever headphones you wish. And it also has a slot for a micro SD card for up to 2 gigabytes of extra storage. The iPhone has a 2-mega pixel camera with no extra options, but it does have the full functionality of an 8-gigabyte video iPod, which is nice, but the weird thing is that the headphone jack is recessed. So not all headphones are going to fit. Totally annoying. The headphones have a mike for answering calls, but man, those iPod headphones hurt my ears. The Safari browser works well and the cool features like weather, maps and stocks are nice. However, the edge in this round goes to the N95. I'm giving it a 5 and the iPhone a 4.
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Up next, how connected are you with these phones?
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A little background for this round. You see the Nokia N95 wasn't even coming to the stage, but there was such a demand for it. So they finally relented and began offering the phone here. However, the phone can't work with the 3G network here because it can't use our frequency band. Too bad for us. Luckily, for the N95 anyway, the iPhone doesn't have 3G either. Although it doesn't have such a good excuse. Both have WIFI and Bluetooth 2 point 0, but you can't use stereo Bluetooth headsets with the iPhone. GPS makes or breaks this round and only one phone has it. The Nokia N95 gets a 4 and the iPhone gets a 3.
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How well do these phones work and sound? Performance is next.
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Audio quality in terms of voice was very good on both phones. They were both tested on the AT and T network here in San Francisco and sounded great even on speakerphone. Now the N95 took a little bit longer to start the camera in the browser than the iPhone did. And I preferred the video playback on the iPhone. It was sharp and beautiful. Audio quality was pretty similar in both phones to me. And they both had about 8 hours of tested talk time. But the N95 had a pretty dismal standby time when compared to the iPhone. For this final round, the iPhone gets a 5 and the Nokia N95 gets a 4.
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And the final score is? 22 for the iPhone and 20 for the Nokia N95. I guess 125 dollars more doesn't necessarily make you a better phone N95. Now you may call me an Apple Fan Girl, but when I stack up the features that matter to me, the iPhone comes out on top. Thanks for watching. If you want to email us, you can do so at prizefight at CNET.com. I'm Veronica Belmont. So long and thanks for all the fish.
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