Being one of the 2 flagship products of Nokia, one might expect that it would be loaded with all the newest features in technology - well, to a certain extent, it is true; think about the GPS, the 5 Megapixel camera, the Xenon flash, the accelerometer, etc...

I even got a 8GB microSDHC card purely because this device could save me the trouble of bringing a dedicated music player (aka iPod) out with me.

Imagine the shock I got when I found out music was literally crawling at the pace of a turtle from my computer to my phone.

Yes, you heard me correctly. Both the Nokia N95 and the Nokia N82 (as well as the N81, mind you) only support Full-Speed USB 2.0 - a very confusing term, that is. I can definitely remember the days when USB 2.0 meant 480Mbps transfer, while USB 1.1 was much slower at 12Mbps. Some time ago it was renamed High-Speed and Full-Speed respectively, although Nokia really should have made it clearer. Really.

Now let's play the blame game. Why the slow USB speeds? Was it a device problem? Was it due to the implementation of the Mini-USB jack in the phone? Was it the cable? Or was it Nokia's design flaw?

Well it seems Nokia has been using older hardware in the design and construction of these phones - hence the reason why they're stuck in the pre-2000 era of transfer speeds while the features have been whizzing up ahead of us.


This problem with using older hardware will probably exist in the (rumoured) upcoming Black N82 as well as the N82 8GB. I'm basing this on the fact that the N95 8GB and the N81 8GB both only support USB 2.0 Full-Speed.

What can you do about this? Nothing. Except to blame Nokia. The hardware cannot be upgraded easily - if transfer speeds are really bugging you, wait another half year to get the Nokia N96, which DOES support high-speed USB 2.0.

*Here's a tip from what we know - the 8GB versions strip away the expansion slot for memory sticks. That means that if you really want to fill it up with 7GB+ of music, you're going to have to manage at Full-Speed USB 2.0 (12Mbps). Doing some simple calculations of switching that from Megabits to Megabytes (8 bits to a byte), that's 1.5 MB/s transfer speed. And that's only the theoretical limit; you're probably going to hit a 1MB/s maximum transfer speed. Assuming 7 Gigabytes of music is 7000MB - it'll take close to 120 minutes to fill all your music.

On the other hand, if you have a high-speed USB card reader, it should be done in under 5 minutes. That's why I advise everyone to stick with memory sticks, rather than the brand new versions with Flash memory and sub-par hardware to complement the transfer.