I’m not entirely sure how they did it - I’m suspecting a combination of devil worship and illicit favours - but Mobile-Review have managed to put a pre-production Nokia N96 through its paces months before the handset is intended to launch in Q3 this year.  In a typically comprehensive piece, Eldar Murtazin covers everything from how difficult the touch-sensitive scroll wheel is, how improved the display is over the N95 (boasting better diagonals and outside readability) and just how fingerprint-greedy the N96 has turned out to be.

Of course, any pre-production handset this early will have flaws not representative of the final model - for instance, the camera didn’t work properly, and the OS and general GUI weren’t as they eventually will be - and so the suggested improvements Eldar puts forward could easily be fixed come release day.  One thing really in need of attention, though, is the price: $800 (pre carrier subsidies, if anybody picks it up in the US) makes for a very expensive smartphone!

[via Engadget]