Nokia N80 review!
I picked up my Nokia N80 a few days ago, and have been playing with it since then. I've been waiting a while to make this purchase, as many others have, because if you go by specs, this is the phone of all phones. The spec sheet read small, sliding form factor, 3.2-megapixel camera (fixed focus), TV-quality video recording, front VGA camera, Symbian 9 3rd edition operating system, and most exciting of all were the connection options ... infrared, bluetooth, GPRS, EDGE, 3G and .... (drum roll) Wi-Fi! That's right, this phone was supposed to have WLAN connectivity built in, so you could use it anywhere a hotspot existed. On top of all that, this was to be one of the few phones to be quadband GSM, covering both the American GSM bands and the rest of the world's. Let's see how it fared...
As exciting as the idea of having Wi-Fi in your pocket was, it wouldn't be very effective unless you had a great browser and a screen that's capable of displaying what you need. Tech geeks will recall that SSR (small screen rendering) made quite a buzz when Opera showed it off proudly in their Opera for Symbian and later Opera Mini browsers, but if you've ever used it, you'd know its not all that effective for a significant portion of the internet. While its true it gives you ease-of-use in that it rearranges given web pages to fit the width of the screen you're using, you can't really do much with sites that use frames, or Java, or Flash, or other plugins. Its basically not good enough to be a desktop replacement. Enter the new Nokia browser, and its dominant partner, the 352x416 screen. Nokia has been very cheap with the screens in their smartphones for some time now - consider that the Nokia N70 (oooh ... an N-series phone!) has the same screen resolution as the original smartphone, the 7650. Now that's not much of a jump for the user, is it? That screen, that has been present on all Nokia Symbian devices until the N90 had just 36,256 pixels to work with. Even if you had Wi-Fi on that (like on the N91, a useless, out-of-date phone if there ever was one) you couldn't really use the 'Net effectively. You'd be scrolling all over the place all day long. And this was while other competitors had much better screens ... my old S700i had a 320x240 screen, as do many Samsungs and other brands. Even Motorola, the most American (read: laziest) of all brands. Finally someone at Nokia woke up and decided to do something. This new screen is 2.1" diagonally, but has an astounding resolution of 352x416, or 146,432 pixels. More than 4 times sharper than the old Nokia screens, this one is unlike any you have ever seen. This is the very first LCD I've seen that you can't see the pixels on, at least with the naked eye. You can try real hard, but you can't see anything. Just crystal clear perfection - the fonts are shown with incredible smoothness. Once you see this screen, you'll wish all the other screens you have around you had the same pixel density, which by the way, is around 10,000 pixels per square centimeter! When you combine this with the new browser, which renders every page as it was originally intended (plugins and all), the internet experience is superb. It has a mouse pointer that, in my opinion, works very well. Better than a touchscreen with stylus, because its more accurate. The mini-map feature is useful on large pages as well. I like this browser so much, I've already started to transfer my bookmarks to it, and being open-source, it will probably get continuous improvement from developers and enthusiasts alike.
A problem I faced with previous smartphones I had was that they were actually pretty ineffective at work. Viewing Word, Excel, Powerpoint or PDF documents was essentially a gimmick, partly because the screen couldn't display the necessary information, and partly because the memory couldn't handle a lot of documents. I found this to be of particularly bad design, because Samsung's D600, while not a smartphone, could load a 20 MB PDF in 2 seconds. And it would be reasonably useful on the 320x240 screen, unlike Nokias. So what were Nokia's smartphones really good for? Bulkier, with crappier battery life than standard phones, I found they didn't do much other than restart all the time. So for everyday use, I made a Sony Ericsson W800i my phone, and it served its purpose very well. Finally, with this iteration, Nokia has improved on all the complaints I had with their previous smartphones. It is now fully capable of using the Word/Excel/Powerpoint viewers, with a PDF viewer on the way. I really hope its capable of loading 20 MB+ PDFs, because most digital magazines are at least that much. The combination of Wi-Fi and the new screen really make it a competent internet device as well. It rendered every page I asked it to without complaint. I frankly wasn't expecting it to load my university's course materials download page, because it wouldn't open with my Windows Mobile-powered O2 Mini, but not only did it load, it looked awesome! I was able to download lecture notes and view them directly on the device - very handy. I also went to pages that had embedded media, which played perfectly as well. I loved how it has an RSS reader built in. If someone can adapt this to automatically download podcasts, then we are SO in motion! Nonetheless, at least I can check when I have new podcasts to download, after which I can just proceed to download them. I noticed something while I was doing that, though - the Wi-Fi on this device is no less than a notebook! It was downloading as fast as my PC would! The range is also quite decent, comparable to a notebook. The interesting thing is that it has a page for SIP VoIP configuration. I put in settings for Gizmo, but I couldn't get it to work - mainly because I don't know how to initiate a VoIP call. If anyone knows how to get this to work, let me know.
Nokia is about to release an AVC codec for S60 3rd edition devices like the N80, so that you can view standard MPEGs and all that. That'll be really good, because someone will be able to do the plugins for the browser (most of it is open source) and then there'll be no difference at all.
S60 3rd edition is a vast improvement on the last version. The way it looks and feels is like Windows XP versus Windows 3.11. It has some good programs built in too, like a music player that works pretty well. The only issue is that there isn't much software for this version yet. I'll be looking forward to Agile Messenger and Skype for sure.
Physically, the device is MUCH smaller than I expected. Its the smallest smartphone I've seen, in fact. Its a little thick looking, but thats excusable when you see the 3.2-megapixel camera at the back. The standard of the slider market is Samsung, and sadly, this phone's slider is not as good. Samsung's are spring-loaded, so when you push up a little bit, it will travel the entire distance. With this, you have to push up all the way, but it at least feels reasonably smooth. I tried playing with the N91's slider, and that was horrendous! Its like forcing it along rails, and the sound it makes will remind you of an old train trying to stop (and you can almost picture sparks from the slider's rails). That thing costs so much and performs so crappy - I don't know what Nokia was thinking releasing that recently. There is a little bit of play horizontally when the slider is closed, but its not enough to bother me (I'm easily bothered by these things). I do think the design itself could have been a little better, because the squarish edges really make it easy for the slider to open in your pocket. Rounded edges would have reduced this a lot, and I suspect this is why Samsung sliders are built that way. Still, its the most attractive smartphone to ever come out of Nokia, and given the capabilities it has, the little niggles I have can be excused.
The camera is a 3.2-megapixel, fixed focus unit with macro mode. Its not as good as your average 3-megapixel digital camera, so it won't replace it totally. Still, the shots are a bit better than the K750i/W800i which was the king of the camera phone hill until now, so in a way, this is one of the best camera phones on the market at the moment. It did win some imaging award from some European company, but who cares about Europe, really (say "really" with a British accent)? The video is quite decent, at 352x288, 15 frames per second. If you don't pan a lot, it looks decent enough on a TV. It has an image stabilizer which I tested out and found to work very well. We're getting closer to eliminating the videocamera, I think. Sony Ericsson has a phone, the W900i that can take video at a full 30 fps thanks to an ATi chip. That is totally decent video, and I can just see Handycam-branded Sony Ericsson models in the future shooting in 720x480 anamorphic video, with a "burn to DVD" button in the SE PC suite.
Although there is a rumoured N83 coming out, with a 5-megapixel autofocus camera and a 4 GB hard disk built in, I don't really see a phone making huge strides over this one for some time. While the hard disk provides additional storage, which is good, considering this phone has 3G, WiFi and can download fast (and Bit Torrent clients are being made), 4 GB is too low for a hard disk that uses a large amount of space and energy and makes the phone susceptible to damage. And the N91's hard disk doesn't work below zero, so my countrymates will probably have an obscenity in response to that. Plus, consider that they already have 2 GB memory cards for this phone, which will probably swell in a few months. They have 8 and 16 GB Sony Memory Sticks (at least in Japan), so a 4 GB HDD won't cut it. The 5 megapixel camera is definitely welcome, though. That's it for now, I'll probably have additional posts about the device as I learn more. Yalla bye-bye!
As exciting as the idea of having Wi-Fi in your pocket was, it wouldn't be very effective unless you had a great browser and a screen that's capable of displaying what you need. Tech geeks will recall that SSR (small screen rendering) made quite a buzz when Opera showed it off proudly in their Opera for Symbian and later Opera Mini browsers, but if you've ever used it, you'd know its not all that effective for a significant portion of the internet. While its true it gives you ease-of-use in that it rearranges given web pages to fit the width of the screen you're using, you can't really do much with sites that use frames, or Java, or Flash, or other plugins. Its basically not good enough to be a desktop replacement. Enter the new Nokia browser, and its dominant partner, the 352x416 screen. Nokia has been very cheap with the screens in their smartphones for some time now - consider that the Nokia N70 (oooh ... an N-series phone!) has the same screen resolution as the original smartphone, the 7650. Now that's not much of a jump for the user, is it? That screen, that has been present on all Nokia Symbian devices until the N90 had just 36,256 pixels to work with. Even if you had Wi-Fi on that (like on the N91, a useless, out-of-date phone if there ever was one) you couldn't really use the 'Net effectively. You'd be scrolling all over the place all day long. And this was while other competitors had much better screens ... my old S700i had a 320x240 screen, as do many Samsungs and other brands. Even Motorola, the most American (read: laziest) of all brands. Finally someone at Nokia woke up and decided to do something. This new screen is 2.1" diagonally, but has an astounding resolution of 352x416, or 146,432 pixels. More than 4 times sharper than the old Nokia screens, this one is unlike any you have ever seen. This is the very first LCD I've seen that you can't see the pixels on, at least with the naked eye. You can try real hard, but you can't see anything. Just crystal clear perfection - the fonts are shown with incredible smoothness. Once you see this screen, you'll wish all the other screens you have around you had the same pixel density, which by the way, is around 10,000 pixels per square centimeter! When you combine this with the new browser, which renders every page as it was originally intended (plugins and all), the internet experience is superb. It has a mouse pointer that, in my opinion, works very well. Better than a touchscreen with stylus, because its more accurate. The mini-map feature is useful on large pages as well. I like this browser so much, I've already started to transfer my bookmarks to it, and being open-source, it will probably get continuous improvement from developers and enthusiasts alike.
A problem I faced with previous smartphones I had was that they were actually pretty ineffective at work. Viewing Word, Excel, Powerpoint or PDF documents was essentially a gimmick, partly because the screen couldn't display the necessary information, and partly because the memory couldn't handle a lot of documents. I found this to be of particularly bad design, because Samsung's D600, while not a smartphone, could load a 20 MB PDF in 2 seconds. And it would be reasonably useful on the 320x240 screen, unlike Nokias. So what were Nokia's smartphones really good for? Bulkier, with crappier battery life than standard phones, I found they didn't do much other than restart all the time. So for everyday use, I made a Sony Ericsson W800i my phone, and it served its purpose very well. Finally, with this iteration, Nokia has improved on all the complaints I had with their previous smartphones. It is now fully capable of using the Word/Excel/Powerpoint viewers, with a PDF viewer on the way. I really hope its capable of loading 20 MB+ PDFs, because most digital magazines are at least that much. The combination of Wi-Fi and the new screen really make it a competent internet device as well. It rendered every page I asked it to without complaint. I frankly wasn't expecting it to load my university's course materials download page, because it wouldn't open with my Windows Mobile-powered O2 Mini, but not only did it load, it looked awesome! I was able to download lecture notes and view them directly on the device - very handy. I also went to pages that had embedded media, which played perfectly as well. I loved how it has an RSS reader built in. If someone can adapt this to automatically download podcasts, then we are SO in motion! Nonetheless, at least I can check when I have new podcasts to download, after which I can just proceed to download them. I noticed something while I was doing that, though - the Wi-Fi on this device is no less than a notebook! It was downloading as fast as my PC would! The range is also quite decent, comparable to a notebook. The interesting thing is that it has a page for SIP VoIP configuration. I put in settings for Gizmo, but I couldn't get it to work - mainly because I don't know how to initiate a VoIP call. If anyone knows how to get this to work, let me know.
Nokia is about to release an AVC codec for S60 3rd edition devices like the N80, so that you can view standard MPEGs and all that. That'll be really good, because someone will be able to do the plugins for the browser (most of it is open source) and then there'll be no difference at all.
S60 3rd edition is a vast improvement on the last version. The way it looks and feels is like Windows XP versus Windows 3.11. It has some good programs built in too, like a music player that works pretty well. The only issue is that there isn't much software for this version yet. I'll be looking forward to Agile Messenger and Skype for sure.
Physically, the device is MUCH smaller than I expected. Its the smallest smartphone I've seen, in fact. Its a little thick looking, but thats excusable when you see the 3.2-megapixel camera at the back. The standard of the slider market is Samsung, and sadly, this phone's slider is not as good. Samsung's are spring-loaded, so when you push up a little bit, it will travel the entire distance. With this, you have to push up all the way, but it at least feels reasonably smooth. I tried playing with the N91's slider, and that was horrendous! Its like forcing it along rails, and the sound it makes will remind you of an old train trying to stop (and you can almost picture sparks from the slider's rails). That thing costs so much and performs so crappy - I don't know what Nokia was thinking releasing that recently. There is a little bit of play horizontally when the slider is closed, but its not enough to bother me (I'm easily bothered by these things). I do think the design itself could have been a little better, because the squarish edges really make it easy for the slider to open in your pocket. Rounded edges would have reduced this a lot, and I suspect this is why Samsung sliders are built that way. Still, its the most attractive smartphone to ever come out of Nokia, and given the capabilities it has, the little niggles I have can be excused.
The camera is a 3.2-megapixel, fixed focus unit with macro mode. Its not as good as your average 3-megapixel digital camera, so it won't replace it totally. Still, the shots are a bit better than the K750i/W800i which was the king of the camera phone hill until now, so in a way, this is one of the best camera phones on the market at the moment. It did win some imaging award from some European company, but who cares about Europe, really (say "really" with a British accent)? The video is quite decent, at 352x288, 15 frames per second. If you don't pan a lot, it looks decent enough on a TV. It has an image stabilizer which I tested out and found to work very well. We're getting closer to eliminating the videocamera, I think. Sony Ericsson has a phone, the W900i that can take video at a full 30 fps thanks to an ATi chip. That is totally decent video, and I can just see Handycam-branded Sony Ericsson models in the future shooting in 720x480 anamorphic video, with a "burn to DVD" button in the SE PC suite.
Although there is a rumoured N83 coming out, with a 5-megapixel autofocus camera and a 4 GB hard disk built in, I don't really see a phone making huge strides over this one for some time. While the hard disk provides additional storage, which is good, considering this phone has 3G, WiFi and can download fast (and Bit Torrent clients are being made), 4 GB is too low for a hard disk that uses a large amount of space and energy and makes the phone susceptible to damage. And the N91's hard disk doesn't work below zero, so my countrymates will probably have an obscenity in response to that. Plus, consider that they already have 2 GB memory cards for this phone, which will probably swell in a few months. They have 8 and 16 GB Sony Memory Sticks (at least in Japan), so a 4 GB HDD won't cut it. The 5 megapixel camera is definitely welcome, though. That's it for now, I'll probably have additional posts about the device as I learn more. Yalla bye-bye!
posted by Loy at 5:27 p.m.
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