S60 3rd edition / Nokia N80 – feelings after a year

I’ve now used a Nokia N80 for almost a year. While I noted some flaws in the beginning, some other annoyances have since surfaced as time has gone by. So here’s a new list of what’s good and what’s not after plenty of hands-on time.

What’s good

• The display is still great; not many mobiles come even close to the wonderful clarity of the display.
• The form-factor (slider) is surprisingly nice to use; I was skeptical about it first, being used to candybar design, but the slider works quite well.
• Add-on software. The built-in software isn’t anything to write home about (except the browser, which is great!) but some quite useful add-on software has popped up even for 3rd edition. In addition to my earlier list, I especially like OggPlay & DivX Player.

What’s not

• The camera, even if it’s 3 megapixels, is not good enough. It can capture decent pictures in bright daylight, but even then not at even nearly 3 effective megapixel resolution. You can squeeze decent 1-1.5MP photos out with some post-processing, but good-quality 3MP photos? Dream on. In darker surroundings, the camera’s useless.
• Multitasking is a joke. There’s not even nearly enough memory on the device to run more than one program at a time; while in theory you can have multiple background processes, in practise that’s not possible. For example, the work e-mail application, which would be nice to have on at all times, is always automatically shut down when I start the browser. The auto-shutoff to make some room in the memory is efficient in the sense that it shuts down stuff frequently, but results in total lack of real multitasking capability and is often very annoying.
• It’s slow. The UI is, at times, infuriatingly slow. When I press a button I want stuff to happen now and not a few day^H^H^Hseconds from now. Navigating the icon interface is sometimes and the camera shutter lag always annoyingly slow.
• “Security”. Say you’re installing a piece of software; the platform security features force half a dozen or more dialogs, to which you quickly become accustomed to just pressing “Ok” or “Accept” or whatever. Sure it’s a way of shifting the blame to users, but implementing a long series of security questions which users don’t give a damn about is a lame and totally insecure way of “securing” anything.
• The battery sucks. Or, rather, it’s sucked empty in no time. Using WLAN is an especially dangerous thing in that regard and you can almost hear the poor electrons sucked out of the battery at an alarming pace.
• The predictive text input, T9, sometimes finds strange things to write. When in Finnish dictionary mode, it desperately wants to spell “ice” instead of “hae” (get), “the” instead of “tie” (road), “tabs” instead of “taas” (again) and “ship” instead of “siis” (thus).
• Poor media playback capabilities; the RealPlayer that the phone comes with doesn’t know how to play, well, almost anything. Some add-on software helps here, but not enough. It’s frustrating to get a cool video clip on your phone that it can’t play.

WLAN was one of the features I was really looking forward to using, but it gets mixed reviews in my books. I still use it for pod/vodcast downloads at home, but the high drain on the battery, lack of open WLAN hotspots in Helsinki and the unpolished WLAN user interface bring the score down. I really want to like it, but maybe it takes another year or two before WLAN becomes a must-have item in mobiles.

What I’ve also disovered is that the 3G network coverage in the Helsinki area sucks, further highlighting just how far (backwards) Finland has come from the mobile world’s pioneer position. I mean even Tenerife had better 3G coverage than the capital area. Tenerife! And it’s not only coverage issues – me and many others experience mysterios straight-to-voicemail calls, occasional SMS delivery problems and other oddities when on a 3G network.

Anyway, the funny (or sad, depending on how you look at it) thing is that even with all of these flaws, the N80 is still one of the best phones out there. The N93 is too plasticy and unwieldy to my taste, but maybe the N95 will redeem some of the high expectations.