Nokia N81 8GB Cell Phone Review - Multimedia

Alfredo Padilla
Published on December 27, 2007 Comment on this

Accessing Music Software (7.14)

Getting music going on the Nokia N81 was pretty simple. We just had to tap the left soft key on the home screen, hit the center select key a couple of times and voila! We had music in only 2.8 seconds. This is a pretty good time, far better than what we saw on the Nokia N95 and almost as good as the Sidekick LX. You do have multiple entry points for your music if you want to assign the right soft key on the home screen to another function. When music is playing a plugin is added to the home screen that allows you to see what's playing and quickly jump to the music player. The multimedia menu interface also has a music tab that allows you to see what's playing and interact with your library. Neither of these are as fast as having the soft key assigned on the home screen, though.

Cell Phone	Time (sec)	Score
Nokia N81 8GB	2.8	7.14
Nokia N95 w/ US 3G	11.82	1.69
Sidekick LX	2.46	8.13
BlackBerry Pearl 8130	6.13	3.26
T-Mobile Shadow	4.9	4.08
LG Venus	3.62	5.52

Dedicated Music Controls (11.0)
The Nokia N81 has four music specific controls that surround the D-Pad and only light up when you have music playing. These controls are play/pause, stop, next/fast forward and previous/rewind. The latter two will skip between songs when pressed once or scan through songs when you hold them down. We found the controls to be a little small and fiddly. They suffer from the same lack of differentiation, poor feedback and key travel that many of the button on the N81 do. We're glad to see the effort made to make the Nokia N81 a more music friendly device, though.

In addition to those controls a plugin is added to your home screen when music is playing that allows you to view what's playing and quickly jump to the music player. You can also always tap on the multimedia button, which takes you to a system of rotating menus for accessing various multimedia oriented functions. When the key is pressed you are always taken to the music menu first. The volume keys on the Nokia N81 also control music volume whenever it's playing and wherever in the interface you are.

Music Software Functionality and Organization (8.8)

The Nokia N81 music software is the same as we've seen on all our other S60 devices, and that's just fine because it's very good software. Playlists are supported, and you can edit or create them on the device. Tags were supported for all three of our standard file types, WMA, AAC and Mp3. The music library allows you to sort your music by title, playlist, artist, album, genre or composer. There's also a search feature that allows you to quickly find the music you want. What you can't do, unfortunately, is rate music on the device. Album art is supported, but only if it's embedded in the file. The music library is automatically updated with all music files found on your phone and music can be played in the background. There's also an equalizer with a variety of presets and the ability to create your own. All in all its some of the best music software we've see on a mobile device, and that includes the iPhone.

Online Song Downloading (0.0)
Nokia has just recently announced that they will be making available an online music store to compete with those offered by carriers. Unfortunately the store is not yet open in the U.S. so we were not able to test it. As such the Nokia N81 will receive a zero in this section as we only Nokia N81 8GBs based on their capabilities at the time of the review. Readers should note that the store may be active by the time they read this review.

Streaming (0.0)
As with all other S60 devices we've seen the Nokia N81 doesn't support streaming audio from the internet. For this test we attempt to stream Mp3, AAC and Real audio, and the Nokia N81 failed at all three.

Podcast Support (7.0)

We've raved about Nokia's podcast software for awhile now and always regretted the fact that we had to give their devices a zero in this section because the software was not loaded on their phones by default. We are very happy to see, therefore, that the Nokia N81 is the first S60 device that has excellent podcasting software integrated right onto their already excellent music software. This podcast software allows you to subscribe to podcasts, set the phone to automatically update them on a schedule and creates one simple place to go for this content. There is also a library of podcasts that you can browse, but we do wish that the software better integrated with podcast feeds we find using the web browser. Despite this small niggle we are not only happy to give the Nokia N81 points in this section, we're happy to give the device a good score for good software.

Music Sync with PC (7.0)
You can synchronize your music between a Nokia N81 and a PC using either Nokia's PC Suite software or simply by using Windows Media Player, our preferred solution.

Music Formats and DRM (4.0)
The Nokia N81 supports Mp3, AAC and WMA files. It also supports Microsoft's PlaysForSure DRM, which we hope soon dies the same death that all DRM should die. That aside it does allow you to use the Nokia N81 with music purchased from compatible stores like Rhapsody, Napster and (someday) Nokia's own store, all of which use PlaysForSure (or Certified for Windows Vista as it has recently been rebranded, curiously enough).

Music Interruption (10.0)
The Nokia N81 handles interruption to music playback like a champ, pausing the music when the call comes in and starting up again when the call ends.

Video

Video Software Access (3.45)
We were able to get a video playing on the Nokia N81 in just 5.8 seconds. This is the time it took us to go from the home screen unlocked until we had a video playing. This is not a great time, but it's ok. You can see below that a lot of our comparison phones also did poorly in this section, with the Nokia N81 putting up the best score amongst the bunch.

Cell Phone	Time (sec)	Score
Nokia N81 8GB	5.8	3.45
Nokia N95 w/ US 3G	10.22	1.96
Sidekick LX	n/a - no video playback	0.00
BlackBerry Pearl 8130	6.98	2.87
T-Mobile Shadow	8.92	2.24
LG Venus	9.12	2.19

Video Controls (4.0)
Like other S60 devices the Nokia N81 uses Realplayer for video playback. This is not good, and you can see that based on the video controls. The center select key acts as a play/pause, which makes us wonder why the left soft key does the same thing. On top of that the right soft key is assigned to stop, which is not a very useful function. Holding down on the up/down keys will fast forward or rewind, the volume keys do their thing but for some reason left/right doesn't do a thing. We found the controls confusing, redundant, and annoyingly unable to be customized.

Video Software & Organization (1.0)
Realplayer on the Nokia N81, and all S60 devices for that matter, is one of the poorest excuses for video software we've seen on any smart phone. All the software does is play back video, and it doesn't even do that well. As we discussed above the controls are confusing, but on top of that there's no way to organize your videos with Realplayer. There is no library, instead you will need to find videos using a file browser interface or launch them from the Gallery. Either way you can forget about things like organizing by video type, playlist support, and search. About the only thing it can do that we appreciate is play video in full screen landscape orientation. If you want to do some serious video watching on the Nokia N81 we recommend you go out and get a third party solution like Coreplayer.

Video Sync with PC (7.0)
You can synchronize videos with the Nokia N81 just as easily as you can music, either using PC Suite or more easily by using Windows Media Player. Forget about synchronizing playlists though as there's no software on the Nokia N81 to support video playlists.

Video Formats (6.0)
The Nokia N81 was able to handle all of our test 3GP videos, vanilla Mpeg-4 files, H264 encoded files and Real video. It wasn't able to handle Quicktime, Windows Media Video, or Flash.

Video DRM (0.0)
Despite its solid support for various video types the Nokia N81 does not support any form of video DRM. Given Nokia's seeming love of Microsoft's DRM standard we don't think it would be asking too much for the N81 to support their video DRM so you could watch videos purchased from Amazon's Unboxed store.

Video Playback Smoothness (10.0)
We were pleased to see that the Nokia N81 was able to play back all five of our test video files, which we encode at a variety of bitrates ranging from very low to high quality.

Online Video Downloading (0.0)
The Nokia N81 doesn't support any premium direct video download services. Nokia does offer a few links to some videos on its website, but there's no marketplace for video downloads like iTunes or Amazon offers on your computer.

Video Streaming unscored
We don't score this section because there really aren't any standards for streaming video to mobile devices yet. We do test a few sites for informational purposes, however. We were pleased to see that the Nokia N81 supported streaming 3GP video from both Zoovision.com and Youtube Mobile. It didn't support streaming Windows Media Video from windowsmedia.com.

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