Nokia N80 3G Phone Review

Nokia hatched the Nseries as an elite brigade of 3G multimedia virtuosos. So elite in fact, that with the exception of the popular N70, getting your hands on these ‘multimedia computers’ has proved problematic.

The N90 didn’t even get picked up officially by a network operator. Its 4GB-hard-drive-packing musical sibling, the N91, hasn’t yet hit the shops despite being unveiled just under a year ago. And the N92 TV handset won’t even make it to UK shores because we don’t yet support Digital Video Broadcast for Handheld (DVB-H) technology.

Nokia has gone on record declaring that the Nseries is an exercise in chest thumping and concept building, showing just how high mobile technology can reach, but these handsets have niche appeal, with the majority lacking any mainstream allure. So while we wait for the N91, the next Nseries instalment looks likely to be the N80 slider.

Like the N70 before it, this handset has the traits to make it in the common market. Its Nseries buddies are all fearsome beasts that aren’t trouser-pouch friendly. This is also powerful, but despite being a solid chunky monkey and quite hefty, the N80’s footprint is close to the Nokia 6280 slider and still reasonably pocketable. Considering that it’s armed to hilt with top-line features and connectivity options, Nokia has done well to keep the size down.

But things don’t start well for the N80 – the slider action is far from impressive. After the 6280’s fluid action, which rivalled Samsung’s best, the N80 feels too stiff and sticky, as if running on rusty rails. You will need to give it a fair nudge but it’s worth noting that our review sample was a prototype so any indiscretions might be temporary. Let’s hope the slider mechanism improves.

The N80 runs off Symbian Series 60 (S60) third edition OS, which proved incredibly temperamental, with slow transition between commands and pages. It’s best to test the N80 yourself, though, as in our experience, the S60 OS has never been this erratic and inconsistent, and the fact that our trial copy was a vanilla sample might explain its dodgy performance.

There’s no such problems with the screen, which ups the ante above QVGA in terms of resolution, with 352x416 pixels. Here at 3G.co.uk, we often wax lyrical about the display quality but we can categorically say this is the best we’ve seen from a handset of this class, with crisp definition and vivid colour that elevates web browsing and photo viewing to new levels. While we wait for those true VGA-quality displays currently adorning the Sharp 904 in Japan, this will do very nicely indeed.

Nokia has made it very simple to get your existing digital music library onto the handset. The N80 is recognised as a mass storage device when connected to your PC via USB 2.0 and it’s a simple procedure of drag and dropping your files into the relevant music section window. The N80 supports the gamut of digital formats including WMA and ACC, while you can create playlists on the fly. To qualify for Nokia’s XpressMusic status, handsets have to support a 3.5mm headphone jack, and the N80 obliges with the AD-15 adapter. We plugged in our trusty Sennheiser PX200s and the sound quality was dynamic, with strong driving bass. Equalizer settings adapt the sound to certain genres like Rock, Pop etc, while we found a 60% volume setting was perfect; any increase caused shrill-damage to the lugholes. Your songs are stored on miniSD – a 128MB card is supplied. This won’t offer much scope for storage, but the N80 can support cards of up to 2GB, which will allow around 500 songs providing you don’t share the memory with other multimedia content. The music player is also backed up by a stereo FM radio with Visual Radio capabilities.

Web browsing on the N80 is a pleasure. Already enriched by the stunning display, the N80 also boasts a new Nokia technique called Mini Map to make full HTML web browsing easier on a small screen. A semi-transparent, zoomed-out view of the web page area you’re reading, shadowed by a complete view of the whole web page as it was originally designed, complement full-web surfing on the two-inch screen nicely. Along with internet access, the N80 allows email messaging, and you can read your various attachments like Word, PowerPoint, Excel and PDF files through the Office Document Viewer and Adobe Reader.

Rocking up alongside the main three-megapixel camera is a front-loaded VGA lens for video calling. It finally looks like the Sharp 903 will have a rival in the 3.2-megapixel camera class. Having monopolised this quality of camera phone for so long, its throne is to be challenged by the N80.

The N80 shoots in 2048x1536-pixel resolution for still images and 352x288 for video (in both MP4 format for high-quality footage and 3GP for handset playback and MMS sending).

When it comes to still pics, the N80 just falls short of the Sharp but still delivers quality snaps. Its CMOS lens can’t compete with the Sharp’s CCD-quality technology in terms of colour representation and detail and, unlike its Nseries stablemate, the N91, there’s no Carl Zeiss lens. The lack of autofocus is disappointing, although it will, naturally, still knock spots off any other camera-phone on the market. The 20x digital zoom works fine, but obviously picture quality deteriorates as you move in, while a macro switch sits just below the lens.

The N80 struggles with overcast conditions so highlights are overblown and exposed. There is an LED light for low lighting conditions which does have an affect, despite an unrefined impact. But you can’t quibble too much with the print-quality snaps.

The N80’s video capabilities are just as proficient, with some of the sharpest quality results we’ve seen on a mobile phone. As expected, digital drag does occur but for the most part, the footage is quite slick. You won’t be disappointed.

We made a call to the LG U880 and the results were reasonable. Inevitably there was digital noise and considerable drag when the phone was moved but keep the handset still, and the recipient should get quite a clear view. Audio was a tad muffled through the phone’s speakers so we advise you use a handsfree device.

Call quality is excellent but with such a wealth of multimedia features on board, the N80 is prone to battery drain and you’ll find that you have to charge the juice at the end of each day if you frequently consume these functions, especially web browsing.

As you can see, the N80 is a formidable mobile proposition. In today’s mobile environment, this handset has everything you could demand at the top-level and all in a classy and nicely sized handset. Its feature set may well be too much for some, and while niche features like the UPnP wireless streaming may only connect with early adopters, an adept music player and powerful camera still give it mainstream appeal. It’s hard to predict whether it will meet the N70’s universal popularity, but out of the Nseries range so far, the N80 is the phone with the most potential.

The N80 offers every possible connectivity option you could dream of, with wireless LAN, Bluetooth, USB and infrared. The biggest boon is the Wi-Fi 802.11g, which brings faster speeds (capacity dependent) to the mobile internet: 54Mbps compared to 3G’s 384Kbps. The advantages to this method of accessing the internet on the move are blatantly obvious, but there is a bigger picture involved, namely VoIP. The N80 is being primed to let you make voice calls over the internet using UMA (Unlicensed Mobile Access) technology; this is basically the new mobile standard for switching between mobile and W-LAN networks. It’s surely only a matter of time before Nokia partners with a VoIP or broadband company (Orange is strongly rumoured) to offer a BT Fusion-esque service.

Anyone with a wireless home entertainment set-up will dig the N80’s Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) feature. It’s the first ever phone to carry such technology and it lets you automatically hook up with your compatible system to stream content like music, photos and video from the phone to your PC, hi-fi or TV. While this remains a cool feature, the majority of us won’t have an impressive wireless home entertainment suite to play with – except, perhaps, on our PCs.

This review covers the above mobile phone only and does not address the performance of any 3G Network. The score is based on a 3G mobile phone checklist.

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