Nokia N80 Review

In yet another example of Nokia producing phones for the avid new technology fan boys the Nokia N80 extends the Nseries with yet another feature packed multimedia handset, where the lines between a PDA, phone, music player and digital video capture are all blurred into a delightful blend of style and function.

As with many phones that push the feature set to the limit the Nokia N80 is a sizable beast, coming in at 95.4 x 50 x 26mm and 134grams which will stretch your pockets a bit both physically and monetarily with its anticipated price of 570 euros.

The N80 is a stylish looking phone coming in both silver and black, although nothing exceptionally different as compared to the N91, with its typical sliding handset that is quite firm and tightly locked which in our opinion was just a bit too sticky, however over time and heavy use these things do tend to loosen up. Thankfully all major function buttons are outside of the cover however thus letting you use the phone comfortably without resorting to consistently opening/closing it.

The Nokia N80 OS of choice is the popular Symbian Series 60 (S60) which goes onto power an impressive screen offering a resolution of 352 x 416 pixels that had an extremely sharp display with impressive colour levels that gave us some of the best web browsing and picture viewing experience to date from any mobile phone in its class.

When you start to use the camera, the screen flips round to landscape orientation and then the phone is held like any normal camera. A dedicated camera key on the side of the phone is in the same area as the shutter key would be on standard cameras. This automatic screen flip along with the phones excellent display makes the phone both simple and a joy to use for basic photography.

Along with the main 3 mega pixel camera is a front VGA lens for video calling. The quality of this making it one of the top dogs of the ~3 mega pixel camera class.
The N80 takes photos at 2048 x 1536-pixel resolution for still images and 352 x 288 for video in both MP4 for high-quality video and 3GP for phone playback and MMS.
Still pictures with the N80 dont quite come upto the standard of some of Sharps offerings but still delivers eye catching and impressive photos. It has a CMOS lens that can’t compare with Sharp’s CCD-quality technology in terms of colour and detail and unlike others in the Nseries the N91, there’s no Carl Zeiss lens. No auto focus is a drawback, although it is still far better than any other camera-phone on the market. The 20x digital zoom is excellent, but as always picture quality decreases the further you zoom in.
Its a simple matter to hook up the N80 to your PC via USB 2.0 and then a quick drag/drop of music files, video straight onto the memory card of the phone (128 Meg miniSD supplied but supports up to 2GB). The music formats support include MP3, AAC, eAAC+, WMA with the playback through the headphone jack being of excellent quality, superb bass output and a wide selection of customizable equalizer settings for various music genres. Along side the music player the Nokia N80 also provides a FM radio player with added visual radio functionality.

Nokia has developed a new technology that makes web browsing so much simpler and more enjoyable on a small screen with the Mini Map software that enables you to view a semi-transparent zoomed out view of the area you are looking all shadowed by an original version of the webpage. Along with standard internet access, the Nokia N80 also allows email, and viewing of various attachments like Word, PowerPoint, Excel and PDF files through Office Document Viewer and Adobe Reader.

On connectivity the N80 offers every option you could possibly want, wireless LAN, Bluetooth, USB and infrared. The biggest boost is given by the Wi-Fi 802.11g, which brings faster speeds to the mobile internet: ~54Mbps compared to 3G’s 384Kbps. The advantages of this for accessing the internet are blatantly obvious, but there is something some people may overlook that is important, and that is VoIP. The N80 is being set to let you make voice calls over the internet using UMA (Unlicensed Mobile Access). USM is set to be the new standard for switching between mobile and W-LAN networks.
If you have a wireless home entertainment set-up you will surely love the N80’s Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) feature. It is the first phone to use such a technology which lets you automatically link up to your home system and stream content like music, photos, video etc from the phone to your PC, hi-fi system or TV.

Lastly how can we talk about a mobile phone without mentioning call quality? Its quite simply excellent, as with most mobiles these days call quality is reaching a peak and the push now is simply more and more multimedia features, however with so many features on the phone, the Nokia N80 battery can drain extremely quickly and you’ll find that you have to charge the juice at the end of each day if you use the multimedia functions a lot.

• OS: Symbian Series 60
• Size: 95.4x50x26mm
• Weight: 134g
• Display: 262,144 colours
• Resolution: 352x416 pixels
• Camera: 3 megapixels
• Video recording / playback: Yes/Yes
• Audio playback: MP3, AAC, eAAC+, WMA
• Connectivity: W-LAN, Bluetooth, infrared, USB 2.0
• Internal memory: 40MB
• Memory card slot: miniSD (128MB card supplied, support up to 2GB)
• Java: Yes, MIDP 2.0
• Games: Yes
• Messaging: SMS, MMS, IM
• Email client: POP3, SMTP, IMAP4
• Ringtones: Polyphonic, monophonic, True Tones, MP3
• Internet browser: WAP 2.0, xHTML, HTML
• Frequency: Quad-band + 3G
• Talktime: 180 mins
• Standby: 192 hour