Nokia N82 Review

The N95 was happily sitting at its high perch as Nokia’s most premium and best selling phone when one fine day the stork delivered the N82 to the unsuspecting masses. This put the N95 into a spot of bother. Everyone thought it was promising and the ads on the idiot box looked good, the phone looked even better (in th ads, i.e.) but does the phone live up to the expectations? Lets find out.

Looks, design and build quality

The N82 bears a striking resemblance to the N73, except that it looks as if the N73 put on some weight. But surprisingly, this doesn’t translate into more mass and the weight seems well distributed all across. (It could do with some size shedding though). This gives the handset a sturdy solid and chunky feel. But nevertheless, it does feel as though it might just slip away the palm.

Sadly Nokia doesn’t have any more colors than the one shown in the picture. It looks nice alright, but the bright metallic shade might not be to everybody’s liking.

Keypad

The keypad has a rather odd design and you can operate it best when you have a slight overgrowth of fingernails. It looks like some old pocket calculator and I don’t think it was such a smart option. Giving something new(and stupid) is not always necessary, Nokia; a normal keypad would have done just fine.

Display

When I wrote about the iPhone back in August, I was sure of its tech trickling down in the other phones. Sure enough, we have the accelerometer making an appearance in the N82. What this essentially does is, when you tilt the phone horizontally, it changes the orientation of the screen to landscape. And back to portrait, when you hold it straight.

That apart, the display is a neat little 2.4 inch unit displaying 16.7 million colors. I had no problems reading the display even in bright sunlight.

Entertainment and Multimedia

Full marks to the N82 here. There’s hardly anything out of the blue that the N82 cant execute. The photo gallery, albeit a bit slow to load, looks delicious. The phone also has a 3.5mm jack to insert your own headphones and have fun.

Camera

Coming to the piece de resistance of the N82, its brilliant Carl Zeiss 5MP camera with a Xenon flash. Thank goodness for the small mercies I say. The camera on this phone is as good as I have ever seen. Color reproduction is fairly accurate. Here are some pictures (I ran out of battery juice when I wanted to take a macro shot)

PerformanceNokia phones are never really performers. They are more like elephants; loaded but slow. There’s no escaping the same sluggishness exhibited in other phones. But call quality and battery life are a lot better in that context.Thanks to that big size, I presume Nokia must have had enough space to plonk a big ass battery into the phone. And sure enough, we see a 1050mAH battery doing duty in the N82. You can easily go 2 full days without a run to the power socket. 2 days of listening to music 3 hrs a day, some camera usage, 1 hour of talking and some bluetooth usage.

Multimedia and Entertainment

N series phones have never had a problem being entertaining Geisha’s of a phone and this one just follows the rule. It can take on everything you throw at it and them some. It also has a 3.5mm jack so that you can fit in any god damned headphone you want. It also doesn’t miss out on a FM radio player.

The on board games too are worthy of a mention. You have FIFA 07, Asphalt 3 and Snake, which is a delight to play.

Conclusion A lot cheaper than the N95 and like me, if you hate moving parts, this is the one for you. If you don’t mind the size and the chunky looks of the Nokia N82 is a sweet deal considering the price which is a lot lower than the N95.

Tags: n series, n82, nokia

Nokia E65 review

Nokia had a pretty amusing definition of a business phone when they launched the Communicator series a long time back. Functionality apart, it was a potent weapon for personal scale destruction. It was so big, huge and stupid that you could threaten people with it, “One shot, Dilbert, and you’re toast”. It resembled a geometry case a kid would take to school and was good if you were an absolute show off; the kind who’d take a Louis Vuitton even to the loo.

But not any more. The new range of E series pitches its tent bang opposite to Sony Ericsson’s P series and the Blackberry’s of this world and today we’ll be taking a look at the E65. (The E61 and E51 will certainly follow. Its just that I haven’t had enough time with the other phones)

Looks, build quality and feel

Nokia seem to have finally got a slider design right. Their other sliders (6270, N80, N95 et al) were rather boring and boxy. I’ll also go so far as to call them phones meant for chimps and orangutans. But not this one.

It looks failry slick and you wont have a problem slipping it into your coat or your jeans pocket. Its nicely rounded off at all the right places and feels nice to hold. Its got just the right size, neither too fat nor so anorexic that it might snap if you so much as travel in public transport.

On the front you see the screen, the light sensor(more on this below) and the navigational keypad. Nokia have done a smart thing here by cramming all the keys here so that the only reason for you to slide the erm… slider will be to punch a number or a message, which has a fairly nice feel, by the way.

Display and Camera

The E65 features a 16M color screen with a native resolution of 240×320 which is pretty readable in any kind of light thanks to the aforementioned image sensor. What this does is, sense the ambient light and automatically change the brightness of the screen to whatever it deems fit. You can control the intensity of this, but be sure to go easy on it, it loves to drink battery juice.

 

 

The camera is a 2MP unit and is strictly average. The images produced are fairly noisy and color reproduction is not up to mark. Which makes it good only for casual clicking.

Here are some pictures

Business features

The E series is a business phone and does justice to the tag. It features all sorts of organizing tools despite having Quick Office wherein, sadly, you can only view, not edit, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files.

It also has the all the eMail solutions possible like BlackBerry Connect, IntelliSync Wireless mail and a VPN client to access your corporate mail. Another E series exclusive feature is the Nokia Team suite. This allows you create groups of your employees and co-workers. This can be particularly useful to some team leader.

Connectivity

Nokia have left no stone unturned on this front and I’ll just assault your senses with a bevy of 3-4 letter mumbo-jumbo sounding abbrevations. The phone has 3G, UMTS and quadband, Wi-Fi 802.11b/g, VoIP over WLAN, GPRS, EDGE, USB, Infrared and Bluetooth 1.2. They should have considered providing Bluetooth 2.0, but then no phone has everything I want, so, boo.

You also have the option of adding a GPS receiver and use the inbuilt maps application in case you get lost ‘finding that-hottie-in-HR’ on the other wing.

Entertainment

The phone isn’t really meant to handle all this, but it manages to do the job fairly well. It can play MP3’s, AAC, Real Audio, MPEG4 and 3GP videos. The sound through the inbuilt speakers is average.

Performance and battery

This phone is one of those few Nokia phones I have seen which don’t give copious amounts of lag time at everything you do. That can be attributed to the ARM9 processor which runs at 222MHz and eats almost everything you throw at it.

The battery too is stellar and will easily run 2 days without a charge under normal usage. Which is like a hour of talking, a bit of bluetooth socializing, some Wi-fi browsing and a sprinkling of camera usage.

Whats Good

• Good design
• Well built
• Fast enough
• Good battery life
• Lots of connectivity options
• Quadband

Whats Bad

• No Bluetooth 2.0 and A2DP
• No editing documents
• Average camera
• No 2nd video cam for video calls
• Mono headset

Whats in the box?

Handset, charger, mono headset, carrying pouch, user manual, PC Suite

Conclusion: The E series successfully puts up a worthy fight to the other business phones in its price range and while at it, it looks good too.

Price

• India 14,500 to 15,500
• USA $350 to $450

SatishSays dot Com rating 7/10

Tags: E series, nokia

My Apple iPhone Review

Trust Apple to build the hype. I’ll bet no one and their uncle can do what Apple did with the iPhone. First call a press conference and give a stylish walk through of the phone features. Jaws on the floor, its Apple, baby. Everyone starts buzzing about the iPhone and how it is going to be a “breakthrough internet and communications device”. Everyone’s waiting for the next big thing after “electricity and sliced bread”. Everyone wants one. Steve’s rubbing his hands in glee…

The iPhone indeed is a path breaking mobile device and I wouldn’t hesitate to call it the best phone in the world.It has its fair share of niggles, but then, which phone doesn’t? Lets take a better look.

Since this is not your usual hum-drum phone, and has many innovative features in it, I would like to talk about them first.

1) Multi-touch (Watch video)

With multi-touch you can flick, pinch AND tap. To zoom out of a photo, pinch, to zoom in, just reverse the pinching action. It senses touches by means of an electrical field and allows very natural actions. Supremely functional and all the girls could say was “WoW!” @ 150dB.

2) OS X (Watch Video)

The legendary,sexy Apple OS X on a phone!! You gotta be kidding me! Well, no I’m not. And somehow Apple seem to have got the whole integration very right. Its very multitasking friendly and I only wish there was someway to control all the running applications like on Symbian OS.

3) Accelerometer (Watch Video)

This has to be one of the coolest features on the phone! In essence it is a motion sensor, which detects whether the phone is vertical or horizontal. Accordingly it changes the viewing from Portrait to Landscape.(only in apps that support it, mind)

4) Proximity Sensor (Watch Video)

This is another cool feature. When you get a call, the screen and your cheek make all sorts of contact, and there might be inadvertent touches. So, in order to avoid that, we have a sensor which, during a call, turns of the touch screen and saves battery. How thoughtful.

Now, if I may have your attention, we shall get on to reviewing the phone as I usually do.

Looks,Design and Build Quality

Apple always makes sure that their products might not always have the best of features but they certainly do have gorgeous looks. Nothing different with the iPhone here. Sleek, sensuous and sophisticated. The smooth curves, the chrome lining, the lightly brushed aluminum finish at the back… its all top notch. It has a solid feel to it and makes for a nice fit in the palm. The heads will turn, don’t worry dahling.. And don’t be too surprised if someone comes and gets too chatty with you. Its a conversation starter in every sense of the term.

Input and Output

The beautiful 3.5 inch 480 x 320 multi-touch screen is the primary input as well as output. It is easily the most stunning display i’ve ever seen on a mobile device. Period. Your fingers are the only way to operate it, and its quite the fingerprint magnet. But it is absolutely scratch resistant, and you can use your shirt sleeve or jeans to wipe it off. Better still, get a good screen protector, and life will be much better.

The on-screen keyboard is the way to enter all the numbers and letters. This one is easily the best on-screen keyboard in mobile history and can easily stake claim to be the best substitute for the physical keyboard. The iPhone uses a combination of dictionary and keymap prediction to help out typing.

There arent too many buttons around on the phone. Just a home button on the front(which takes you back to the SpringBoard or the main screen), a volume and a silent switch to the left and a Sleep/Wake button on the top. Thats it. The multi-touch screen will handle all the rest of the inputs. Thank you,very much. Also, to the top is the sim card tray. You insert a pin and the tray comes out gracefully. But, you do need a pin. Bah.

There is also a 3.5mm headphone jack to the top and Apple provides a pair of ear buds. They are the ones which can be found on iPods with a slight difference. It has a mic-cum-switch. I was really amazed by the size of the microphone and was even more surprised when it turned out to be a switch as well. Apple. Jaw drop inducer par excellence. And the voice quality (according to the people on the other end) was better than the in-built microphone. All the more reason for you to use it.

Performance and the Phone part of it..

Honey, this thing is fast!! There, I said it straight of. That is what happens when you plonk a 620MHz ARM processor and 128MB of RAM in a device which probably took lessons on “how to be anorexic” from Angelina Jolie. But such specs are a necessity when you look at that beautiful interface. I just cant stop emphasizing how fast it really is. The time taken from clicking the picture and saving it takes all of 2 seconds. Booting up in less that 10 seconds. Instantaneous firing up of any application. I could go on and on, but you probably have got an idea.

Battery life is just too good. The claimed figures are 8hrs of talk time and around 20hrs of music. I havent tested it to such levels yet, but other reports tell me, that actually is the case. Which is all too good. The iPhone wont demand a run to the wall socket for its cuppa every day even under heavy usage.

Now, let me get on to the phone part of it. Its quite simple to make and recieve calls on the iPhone.(Watch Video) The only problem is finding contacts in the address book, because it has no physical keyboard and neither do you have search. You can either flick through contacts or use the alphabet index on the right,which makes it a tad easier to get your contacts. One good thing is that, the faster you flick your finger, the more contacts it traverses. So you can jump down some 50 contacts in one flick.

Voice quality through the earpiece is nothing remarkable. But those at the other end reported a crisp voice.

iPod

The iPod part of the phone has been given a complete overhaul. And like Apple is advertising, it is the best iPod to date. The media integration is extremely good. Plug it into iTunes, and you’re done.

Fire up the Pod from the SpringBoard and just twist it to display in landscape mode. Now you can witness one more of Apple’s gems, CoverFlow. The effect is similar to shuffling CD’s in your own rack. See the pic below.

If you want to play a song from a certain album, just get it to the middle of the screen by flicking it and tap on the album cover once. The album cover will rotate smoothly to display the tracks in that album, tap it once to play your song. (sigh, why cant we have such eye-candy on other phones..). The audio quality is just as on the iPod’s and we wont get into the “Apple ear-buds, suck or not”, debate. Thats personal taste and for you to decide.

The jack provided is a standard 3.5mm jack, but its recessed. Thin pins will easily fit,but if your pin is on the fatter side, you will need an adapter to fit in your own ear/head-phones into it.

Camera and Internet

The camera is a 2.0MP unit. You can just click and watch the shutter animation. Thats about it. The image quality is pretty good, considering the fact that, there are no settings, whatsoever.

Here are some pics of the cam

Surfing the net on the iPhone is a joy! Rendering is spot on, and the muti-touch gestures are applicable here too. Safari works for me and the speed on the Vodafone EDGe network is perfectly usable.

Time to Crib!!

Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy!! Apple usually are perfect at whatever little they do. Hence, I take immense pleasure in bashing them up. So why did Steve & Co. decide to give the MMS feature a skip?? And no 3G as well. Whats so “breakthrough” about not having 2 of the most basic communication options which everybody is offering. No video recording either. Also, why cant I pair to any other device to transfer at least photos and stuff, if not music.

Also, the camera should have had some more settings and a larger pixel rating. 3.2 is the de-facto standard these days. But, I think most of these problems will be solved by means of Firmware updates. Or maybe the next generation of iPhones. Which was precisely why I chose to buy the SE P1i and not the Apple iPhone.

Whats Hot

• Seamless design
• Multi-touch, accelerometer, proximity sensor
• OS X on a mobile device!
• Awesome interface
• Amazing Media Player
• Great Internet Experience

Whats Not

• No MMS
• No 3G
• AT&T only (can be hacked, not much of an issue)
• No custom camera settings
• No native 3rd party application support (this too can be worked around)
• Screen prone to finger prints (slap on a screen protector as soon as you buy it)

Whats in the box? Phone, USB cable, Wall socket, wiping cloth, USB docking stand, manual.

Price (8GB, all taxes inclusive)

• US $450
• India 30000/- onwards (not officially on sale)

Conclusion : The iPhone is an amazing device and it has certainly raised the bar in many aspects and the way we go about managing our business on a phone. One more thing it has successfully managed to do is that it has pushed every other manufacturer back to the drawing board. Expect better phones from everybody now. This is going to be good in the end for, you, the consumer. Till then, chew the Apple!

Tags: Apple, iPhone