Nokia N85

I was given the Nokia N85 to play with over the Dec / Jan holidays. Compared to the other phones on the market, the N85 stood out. I’m a huge Nokia fan and for the last year and a half, I was disappointed with Nokia’s releases. Yes, I’m eagerly awaiting their ‘answer to the iPhone’ as its been dubbed – the Nokia 5800.

Back to the N85, it was not as chunky as the N96, but rather light. The large bright screen was ideal for browsing the net and playing games. The main reason we were given the phones was to test the games on the N-gage* platform.

I was disappointed that the game One (very similar to Street Fighter) crashed the phone after every fight. I ended up playing a lot of Poker, some Tetris, Fifa and Star Wars Force Unleashed.

I couldn’t use the phone as my primary one because I was given a sim card preloaded with airtime – so it was used for surfing and gaming. The battery life was decent – if I didn’t play games everyday, it would have lasted much longer.

I downloaded the latest Opera Mini and it supports full web browsing. I picked up 3.5G most of the time, which was really fast. If you use your phone to surf the net, then the N85 would be ideal.

If you use the Gmail application on your mobile, then you will be slightly disappointed as it runs very slowly on the phone. Although, I think this problem is more a Google one than Nokia.

Some Nokia N85 specs:

• 2.6″ 16M-color OLED display
• 5MP camera
• Symbian OS 9.3 with S60 3.2 UI
• 3G with HSDPA support
• Wi-Fi
• USB and Bluetooth v2.0
• FM transmitter
• 8GB memory
• Built-in accelerometer
• 3.5 mm audio jack
• TV out
• Stereo FM Radio
• Dual slide design for gaming and audio

Its definitely one of the better Nokia’s out there but I think Nokia is trying too hard to break into the mobile gaming market. They should stick to what they’re good at – making phones.

* Current phones supporting the N-gage platform are 5320, 6210, N78, N79, N81 8GB, N82, N85, N95, N95 8GB, N96 and launching soon, N97.

Tags: mobile, n-gage, nokia, nokia N85

Review: Nokia N82

I was given the N82 to use for a month. Something that I noticed immediately was the speed between applications and the launching of them. Now that I’ve “downgraded” back to my N70, I am getting irritable at how slow everything is.

At the N82 launch last December, the main focus was the photography. It has a 5MP camera, Carl Zeiss lens, and a Xenon flash, which is really powerful. I tested it by taking pictures in the dark and they were clearly visible. Very impressive for a camera phone.

The N82 came preloaded with a PanoMan, MotionLens and w-Postcard application. PanoMan allows you to take panoramic pictures. Its very simple to get into, and the panoramic image takes a few seconds to compose. MotionLens lets you to zoom into a picture by holding ’5′ and moving the device forward to zoom in and backward to zoom out.

w-Postcard is quite a clever little application. If you’re on holiday and take a nice scenic picture and want to create a postcard, just open the picture in the application and then you will be prompted to add text over the pic. The clever thing is that the text is actually a picture that you take. eg if you’re in Durban and you see a “Welcome to Durban” sign, simply take a picture of the sign, and it will automatically capture the text only. You will be allowed to edit / customise the text before placing it over your initial picture.

Another feature that is a firm favourite is the wifi capability. Its going to be a standard feature in my next phone. This was very handy while I was waiting at Johannesburg International Airport a few weeks ago. I used my old mweb login to surf as they give you 300 free minutes a month. While I was in Hong Kong, I picked up on some wifi signal and also managed to check email and logon to facebook.

If you’re a Nokia fan, then you wont be disappointed with the N82. I’m already missing its speed.

Originally blogged on My Digital Life

Tags: n82, nokia