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