Review: Nokia N82

I’ve been the happy owner of a Nokia N82 for about a week now. As can already be deduced from the word “happy” there, I’m quite satisfied with it. Like earlier, other people have done much better work at thorough reviews on the N82, so I’ll just list some good and some bad things I’ve noticed so far:

The good

• Lots of memory. This is actually pretty sweet, both in terms of the on board standard storage and the RAM. The highly welcomed additional RAM helps to keep applications running on the background while the adequate-though-not-plentiful standard storage means you can actually install some software also on the phone memory instead of the memory card – and there’s a 2GB memory card included which is nice. As for the amounts, the N82 has 90MB free RAM, which is more than double of the N81 8GB which at 42MB free was already a big improvement over the 18MB free RAM on the N80 and N95.

• GPS. It works. I don’t know what it is with the implementation (could be A-GPS), but on the N82 I get a GPS fix remarkably quickly (typically within 10-20 seconds) compared to my earlier experiences and get perfect coverage on buses and trains – even indoors on occasion. In short, it works as it’s supposed to.

• The keypad – I had my reservations about the teeny tiny keys (about the size of a grain of rice), but they actually work quite well. And without the stupid music keys scattered everywhere, I get way fewer wrong key presses than with the N81. If you have particularly big hands, however, the keys are likely to be too small.

• Battery life is not too bad. It’s certainly partly due to lowered expectations over the course of the years (though I can still remember managing a week easily with my 6310i), but the N82 survives much better on this front than the dismal N80 or the original N95. One day of heavy usage is not a problem and that’s enough for most occasions. Two days of light-to-moderate usage is okay, too. Any longer than that is pushing it, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles these days..

• The camera is, to put it simply, the first real camera on Nokia devices ever. The 5MP camera with a f/2.8 (fixed 5.6mm, no zoom) Carl-Zeiss lens and much-improved (though still, objectively thinking, quite dismal) response times make a world of difference. There’s also a real xenon-flash that’s actually somewhat usable under certain circumstances and the image quality in daylight rivals that of many compact digicams. Even the low-light performance is very respectable for such an incredibly tiny sensor. I’ve noticed that the N82 automatically adjusts the sensor sensitivity between ISO 100-800.

  Note: everything is relative, of course. Any €300 compact digital camera easily beats the N82, let alone any DSLR. But still, the camera on the N82 actually can be used to take decent photos and the most important thing is that you’ll always have it with you. I therefore dare to predict (again, though with more conviction than last time) that this is the end of poor-quality cameraphone photos appearing on my blog.

• HSDPA is nice, where available. Based on my own research, I should now be happy with HSDPA and stop clamoring for more speed like WiMAX or LTE, but let’s see how it goes.. Anyhow, HSDPA or 3.5G as it’s also known, is very nice when surfing the web or watching video clips etc. I’m positively surprised. (And, at the same time, negatively surprised by Elisa’s horribly poor HSDPA coverage.. should’ve guessed, however, considering how Elisa treats their customers. *sigh*)

• Small things like an automatic keylock are now standard. The automatic keylock timeout controls are very logically placed under “Security” settings, along with the PIN2 codes..

The bad

• The screen resolution seems to be my pet peeve these days; I wish Nokia’d bring back the high-DPI screens of N80. Just a little bit bigger screen with the N80 DPI and we’d have VGA resolution instead of QVGA. Additionally, I believe they could’ve squeezed in a little bit physically bigger screen also.

• The S60 UI and its idiosyncrasies are obviously still there. The platform is the developers nightmare and it’s only marginally easier on the user; still, like Windows, it’s workable after you get used to it. For example, the dysfunction of the quick-access keys (the entire numeric keypad can be used as shortcuts to launch a program on the respective position in the menu – only when you scroll the list down, the keys still only work for the first 12 applications, hence losing the position correlation) on the menus, fighting with access point settings etc are still there along with other quirks.

• Some software instabilities are there (e.g. I’ve already managed to crash the browser twice), but I’m hoping that N82 will become a hit and thus more effort will be put to making it stable. *fingers crossed* In any case it’s already more stable than many other N-series devices.

• The music player and some other applications also leave a lot to be desired for. Luckily there are some excellent 3rd party applications – see my favorites here.

• Too much plastic; though the build quality is generally quite solid, plastic is still plastic and I would’ve liked to see some metal surfaces here.

As you can see, I didn’t find too much to complain about here. There are more small annoyances (like why doesn’t the phone charge over USB, why the PC Suite still sucks etc), but overall the Nokia N82 is one of the first phones in a long time that I could actually easily imagine myself buying even with my own money. In my opinion, that’s quite a remarkable thing – hence I have no trouble recommending the phone. You might also remember from my earlier postings that I wouldn’t buy an iPhone in its current incarnation, so N82 really is good. Is it perfect? No, far from it. But it crosses enough crucial thresholds on many fronts that makes it rather nice to use.

Btw, did you know that Nokia phones with a camera cover slider (i.e. with a slider covering the lens) have a magnetic sensor to tell when the cover is open? This is noteworthy in one situation in particular: if you use a belt case with a magnetic cover clip, it can cause the phone to think the camera is active and drain the battery faster. Just something to keep in mind when choosing a phone holder.