After a bit over two years, it was time for a phone change. My previous phone was a Nokia 6600 sporting an early release of the Series 60 platform. I’d been relatively satisfied with it and as I’ve written earlier, lots of great software was available for it. But as time went by, it started lacking what was needed to be even near the cutting edge in mobile devices.
The new phone, Nokia N80, complete with WCDMA, WLAN, 3MP camera, a gigabyte of storage space etc. should bring me back a bit closer to that ever-elusive category of high-end mobile devices. Quite a few full-fledged N80 reviews have been written, so I’ll skip to things I consider good and not-so-good. With a few weeks of usage, the following are some of my main observations:
What could be improved
- Battery life is on the short side; it survives one day of normal usage, but not two – this is not a phone to take to places where you can’t plug it in for the night.
- Being an S60 3rd edition device, not much software is yet available for it. This should improve in time though, and most of what I need is already out there. The lack of good navigation software is however annoying.
- The camera, while 3MP, doesn’t have quite that many usable pixels, there is no autofocus and no zoom. And let’s not even get into the “lens” quality.
What I like
- The display. I simply love the high-resolution 352×416 screen which is easily readable under all lighting conditions.
- The new web browser; it does the job amazingly well and handles most websites very nicely. I think the mobile version of Opera has met its match.
- 3G and WLAN; it’s quite convenient to be able to surf the net over WLAN without having to rely on the cellular networks. On the other hand, when WLAN is not available but 3G is, things are quite nice over that, too. Definite improvement over GPRS for sure.
- The camera. Despite the shortcomings, it’s very usable for web-photography in particular. Having a decent camera like this always with you is a really, really good thing. The video quality, as you can see below, is not good enough for anything serious, but for a phone it’s not all that bad either.
Overall, it’s by far the best phone I’ve had and is something I’m quite excited about. While I already lust after the image and video quality of some of the upcoming models (like the N93), N80 should be “perfectly adequate” for some time to come.
Below are a couple of example images and one video clip taken with the phone. Clicking will open the full resolution version.
Disclaimer: I work for Nokia but the views expressed in this post or blog in general do not represent the views of my employer etc blahblahblah.
oh no, you’re going to be promoted for writing that disclaimer hahaha.. blahblahblahblah..
Oh I somehow doubt it’s that easy