Nokia N95, a much-awaited smartphone with a unique handset design has started shipping in India.

Its front slides up to reveal a traditional numeric phone keypad and can also slide down providing access to a row of dedicated multimedia playback control buttons, automatically switching the screen to landscape mode and launching the multimedia menu.

Hardware: It is powered by the fastest processor currently used in the Symbian operating system devices and is faster than Dopod D600, a Windows Mobile 5 PDA.

The N95 sports the regular 64 MB RAM (E90 claims to offer almost 80 MB of free operating memory) and about 160 MB internal storage memory and can be expanded with microSD cards to 2 GB.

Dopod D600 comes in with built-in 128 MB ROM, 64 MB RAM that gives N95 a close run. N95 also overtakes when it comes to price. Nokia has priced this baby at a whopping Rs 40,249 while the Dopod has priced its machine at Rs 22,893.

Bells & Whistles Nokia has topped the N95 with a GPS receiver. And a 5 megapixel (sufficient for even 11x14-inch sized prints), autofocus camera can deliver delightful pictures. Dopod's D600 is a 2 MP camera, but when viewed on D600's 71.1mm TFT LCD display, it can put other business phones to shame.

While Nokia has put in a secondary camera to support video calls, despite being a PDA D600 seems to have omitted it. Although DVD quality is certainly an exaggeration by Nokia, but video recorded on N95 definitely offers quality of amateur single-sensor mini-DV camcorders.

Connectivity: The Dopod's PDA has also missed out on connectivity and data transfer options that are found in plenty in N95. Nokia has included HSDPA that give a speed of upto 3.6 Mbps with simultaneous voice and data, wireless LAN will give around 54 Mbit/s. Universal Plug and Play, Bluetooth 2.0 with mass storage class support are a part of N95 too.

D600, although delivers a smooth performance on the Push Email and browsing net front, the presence of Wi-Fi support would have been welcomed in a PDA.

The D600 could not fit in the the web pages in its browser and the more advanced AJAX pages would not work. Navigation was a breeze since this one is a touchscreen machine.

Conclusion: The Nokia's multimedia gargoyle clocks in 3.5-4 hours battery life while the D600 gave around 5 hours.

Dopod D600 can be a great PDA if it has features like Wi-Fi too. Over all, both phones seem to have great displays, decent battery and a fine mix of multimedia.