So the N96 is being dubbed as the N95's successor all over. Now those 'in the know', as they say, know that isn't necessarily the case. I honestly feel it's just a design update to the N95 with a few (read:few) added features. And one left out. Which is the dedicated 3D graphics chip(set).
This happened because unlike previous Nseries, Nokia decided not to use Texas Instruments' OMAP chipset for the N96, instead relying on hardware supplied by STMicroelectronics.
So does this affect overall user experience? Probably not. Does it affect gaming experience? That actually depends on the game and whether or not it was written to take advantage of an integrated graphics chip, should one be available. Sadly, most of the newer N-Gage games do not fall into this category. Global Race, however, does. And James Whatley (deciding which of his countless online presences to link to actually took a while) did a (very popular) video putting the 3D-enabled N95 and the no-3D N96 side to side. Here's the resulting race:
No further comments necessary, I believe.
