I have spent more than 3 weeks with a Nokia N82. This review is a summary of my personal experience with the device over this period of time. This smartphone is one of the fastest symbian phone i have ever used.Multi tasking is awesome and battery life seems good.
Here are the box contents
Form Factor and Display
This is one phone which is as solid as a brick. No rattling sounds from the body.Its so firmly packed and its feels great to use it though its slightly huge.The body is in plastic but it does not look cheap , its actually a good fit in the palm. The phone weighs about 114g and is pretty decent when you take into account the features of the phone. Display is a 240×320 screen with 16 million colors. Its usable in most places even in the Sun.
The display of the n82 is good enough but still small compared to the phones such as the E61i. But I hate the width of the E61i.I would say the display can be a bit bigger.
Keypad
This is one of the most controversial features of the phone.At first I thought that keypad will be difficult to use but I couldn’t complain.Feedback is ok and there is enough spacing between the keys.
There are dedicated volume control keys which also work as camera zoom keys.There is a dedicated camera key as well. There is also a Gallery key between the clear and right nav keys. Some users might find the key interfering with their usage of the nav keys.
Camera
This is one the best phone Cameras from Nokia i have seen . You can capture photos which have a resolution of 2592 x 1944 pixels or 5 Mega Pixels. This is simply brilliant. Do I need to carry my digicam anymore ? Auto focus is great and Carl Zeiss optics too. Plenty of modes to choose from. Im still exploring the Camera. Video recording in MP4 is great with VGA Quality. We will be writing a exclusive story about the N82 Camera as its the best Mobile phone Camera out there in the market.
There a lens cover which mite prevent the dust from entering.This is the first Nokia Camera phone with an inbuilt Xenon Flash so , this means that you can take photos even in areas of low light or even for that matter you can capture a frame in complete darkness.
The phone Cant stand on its base when placed on any surface .. which is a let down for people who try a lot of self photography
GPS
Maps in Action
Route Being Displayed
The GPS Receiver din work indoors but on the road and on the terrace it was fun using the receiver. I used the Nokia Maps application to find routes in Chennai and the software was pretty decent package. The routes and mapping information are from Navteq which Nokia bought recently.So the map data seems to be reliable. Even the route distance calculation seems kinda reasonable.
I also used the Location Tagger App that Nokia Beta Labs has released. I geotagged the photos and uploaded them to Flickr via Shozu.
The Google Maps for S60 uses the inbuilt GPS pretty smoothly and the greatest part is that the dot of your location moves are you are moving / traveling
Mobile web browsing
Mobile browsers are getting really better these days. This phone is not any exception except for the 240×320 screen.Hope they can make the screen a bit bigger considering the phones form factor.Most web sites open up. You can browse using wifi or gprs/edge.The screen rotate feature is super cool for mobile browsing.
Messaging and Email
SMS is simple and clean. For email uou need to goto messages and then mailboxes to add the email accounts.
T9 is cool and another improvement in this version of S60 is that recently used Symbols stackup cleanly. Its a pretty useful feature.
The Conversations App first failed to work but then it started working. Looks like its not fully compatible with he N82 though. Made the phone restart a couple of times.
Media Music and Video
The 3.5 mm stereo out is something we have been longing for. The audio quality is not as good as an Ipod but its really good for a mobile phone. No skipped beats or distortions. I loved listening to music on the accompanying stereo headset. The phone comes with stereo speakers on the right. There was some distortion at high volumes in the speaker. Its pretty loud. FM Radio lets you tune in to the local radio stations.
MP4 , 3gp and real video is supported. Full screen playback is cool. Coming to the audio, the music player is nicely organized and let you play tracks even from a playlist.I managed to dump over 200 songs on my memory card and never got bored when I was traveling as the music kept me happy.
TV Out
This is certainly one interesting feature and impressive one too.
Imagine being able to see your phone screen on a large plasma TV or even a 21 inch TV.
Also the rotate screen feature works even when in TV mode. Even Ngage gaming works !! You can also play audio and video files via the TV and utilize the full power of your television / music system
You need to use the 3.5 mm jackon the top of the phone to connect the tv out cable.
Gaming
This phone has a Dual CPU and a 3D Graphics HW Accelerator. It has 2 Ngage game demos Asphalt and Fifa07. Asphalt was a good experience. Fifa – God save me with the controls, could not figure out. But the graphics quality was great for a mobile phone.
Accelerometer – auto-rotate
Awesome Experience.. Senses if phone is held upright or horizontal and rotates the screen automatically. But personally I turned off the auto rotate feature and find it useful when browsing the web
Connectivity
WLAN
I did not have any issues connecting to wlan networks . The biggest problem was entering the network security keys. I figured out how to use the phones clipboard feature so it made life easier.You can even check the Transmission power , current download and upload speed , total bytes sent and received.
Bluetooth
Din have any issues pairing with other devices.
Software , Applications , Performance and Memory
I have loaded most of the free popular software applications on this phone including gmail for mobile , google maps,shozu, jaiku,handy taskman , youtube , location tagger etc.This phone dint hang often or did not cry for memory primarily due to the almost 90 MB of RAM available at most times. This is super cool when you compare the nasty memory problems i faced with the E61i which is also based on the S60 V3 platform.
Performance wise,this is one of the fastest Symbian phones out in the market. Multi Tasking it really cool. I have mobile browser open – in the mean while i get an SMS and I answer a call. I open the Camera lens cover and click and pic and then upload to shozu. After this I open the gmail app to chk mail and finally I surprised to see that the browser is still alive.
The hotswappable memory card slot is easy to use and by default the N82 ships with a 2GB microSD card which is great. You can upgrade upto 4GB says Nokia but I think upto 8GB is possible. The handset has about 100mb of inbuilt memory.
Battery
The phone comes with a 1050 mAh BP-6MT 3.7V which is charged using a 2.0mm connector. Heavy use means that I would last a day. Moderate use means about 2–3 days. Minimal use means that it should last about 3–4 days on a single charge. By heavy use , i mean frequent usage of wifi , gprs ,bluetooth. Audio playback via speakers or headphones.Running memory intensive applications like Games. Using the Camera with Flash might drain your battery the fastest.
Conclusion
This phone combines the Multimedia features of the Nseries – Top notch Camera, music player and some of the features of the Eseries like mailing ,sophisticated web browsing, Wireless LAN.This phone is feature packed and has something in store for every kind of mobile user be it a student, professional,geek. Its currently the hottest supermodel in the NSeries bandwagon and the best Cameraphone available in the market. If you hear about the price , it would be surprising – About Rs.22,000 . Its really worth every penny if you want to enjoy any of the features I have mentioned above.