Review: Nokia N81 8GB – and a little on the iPhone, too

This is not that much of a review actually, but more of a list of personal experiences. Thorough, more professional, reviews have already been published so go elsewhere for those. Here, however, I will cover some good points and some bad points purely from personal point of view from using the Nokia N81 8GB for a few weeks – a lot of these are also subjective comparisons to my old main phone, the N80.

The good

• The added RAM is one of the best improvements; it’s now actually possible to do multitasking – the browser can be left on the background, lots of other things done, and then one can return to browsing without having the application shut down due to memory management. There’s now ~42MB of free RAM compared with the N80′s 19MB and it makes a world of difference.
• The display (aside from the resolution issues; see below) is nice to look at, bright and big.
• The integrated 8GB memory comes in handy when storing music. I say music, not photos or video, because the camera is not a strong point of this device..
• The slider mechanism works and feels very solid, again a big improvement from the flimsy N80 slider.
• The keypad lock switch; there’s a small slider switch at the top of the phone that locks or unlocks the keypad. Though it feels strange at first, it works nicely enough.
• It’s much more responsive than the N80.
• It certainly looks quite nice; the shiny black finish is beautiful, even if it’s prone to fingerprinting.
• The battery life is significantly improved over the N80.

The bad

• The screen, though big and bright, has poor resolution. I wrote more about this earlier.
• The keypad build quality is not satisfactory; the keys are creaky and flimsy, especially the keys on “top”..
• The memory is not expandable; this “8GB ought to be enough for anybody“-attitude sort of reminds me of something.. However, considering the phone probably won’t last more than 2-3 years at best, this limitation may be something we can live with.
• The 2-megapixel camera takes poor-quality photos and records equally poor, choppy video.
• The navi-wheel functionality is supposed to be nice, but unfortunately the functionality is mediocre at best and only available in the music player. For one, why isn’t scrolling when browsing possible, huh?
• The screen rotation is not automatic and not universally available in the applications.
• The earphones that the phone comes with are uncomfortable as heck; they’re way too small and don’t stay put. The standard audio jack helps in getting a better replacement.
• The battery life, though improved as I mentioned, is still not really good enough for even two full days of active use.
• There’s no GPS. What the heck, as a relatively high-end N-series device, I thought it was a given to have integrated GPS, but apparently not..

Overall, the N81 is clearly targeted to people who mainly want to listen to music or play the upcoming N-Gage games – which means I’m not in the target audience as such. It’s a nice phone overall, but the improvements over the N80 are far less remarkable than what I would’ve expected from two years of development.

How about the iPhone, then?

Incidentally, I also had an iPhone for testing for a few days. Even more so than with the N81, there have been many reviews on the iPhone so I’ll skip the basics and, again, list some main points about iPhone from a purely personal perspective:

• The display is gorgeous. At 480×320 the resolution is not too bad either, though considering the pixel count is about the same as with the N80 that has a physically much smaller screen, a higher-DPI display would’ve been welcomed.
• EDGE is too slow. The iPhone really needs 3G or HSDPA. Surfing the web over WLAN is a joy, but over EDGE it’s quite painful.
• The device itself is really beautiful and feels solid. And requires frequent wiping off due to fingerprints.
• The camera is of terrible quality.
• The UI is, of course, revolutionary. Or is it? It’s certainly a joy to use and offers plenty of smooth eye candy. Even text input works better than I expected, though it’s still not great for longer texts. However, the charm of novelty quickly wears off and though revolutionary, I don’t think the touch UI is that revolutionary. What I mean by this is that though there will certainly be many imitators and other touch-devices coming out next year, all phones will not be equipped with a touch-display anytime soon. Not until haptic touchscreens go mainstream anyway.

As a whole, the iPhone’s a wonderful device. It does few things really well and especially as a first attempt at a phone by Apple it really is remarkably good. However, it does sorely need faster data connectivity and a better camera.

Which would I buy?

Well, as nice as the iPhone is, I would not pay a thousand euros – or even five hundred – for an unlocked iPhone. At least not until it gets a better camera, 3G/HSDPA connectivity and the platform is opened up and even then it’d be a stretch.

Having said that, I wouldn’t pay the current street price of almost 600eur for the N81 8GB version either. So the answer turns out to be that I wouldn’t buy either if it was my own money that did the talking. This doesn’t mean either of them is a bad phone, it just means I don’t consider them worth the money – YMMV.