The dastardly-delectable Darla Mack has been lucky enough to get a pre-release Nokia N95-3 - the US 3G version of the company’s smartphone - and has immediately done some testing on the primary cause of N95 users’ disappointment: the battery life. Well, the great news is that Darla’s N95-3, which came with a Nokia BL-6F battery pack, already looks to be far more power efficient than the pack in the original handset.

With 3G turned off and a SIM in each handset, Darla used both her old N95 and new N95-3 for a day; the former expired around about 9pm, which fits in well with “a charge a day” reports from other owners, while at that point the N95-3 still showed full bars on the battery meter and continued to do so until she put the handset down at well past midnight.

Not a rigorously scientific test, as such, but anyone familiar with the high-end Nokia will know that it doesn’t take any particular degree of rigor to work out that, in its original form, the N95 was woefully underpowered (in the electrical sense).  Hopefully this battery pack will be supplied from the phone’s official launch - predicted to be sometime this week, at Nokia’s flagship stores - and adapted for owners of the first-gen handset; sadly in its current form it won’t actually fit into the N95’s compartment.

N95 Battery life comparison [Darla Mack]