Nokia N81 8GB Cell Phone Review - Organizer

Alfredo Padilla
Published on December 27, 2007 Comment on this

Synchronization Ease of Use (6.67)
As with other S60 devices the Nokia N81 uses Nokia's PC Suite software to synchronize with your desktop PC. The software has had a couple of recent update that, although minor, do improve usability a little. Setup is straightforward, just install the software on your computer, connect your device via USB for the first sync and then set up the items you want to synchronize.

PC Suite allows you to synchronize all the information you might want including contacts, notes, tasks and calendar appointments. Contact photos are also synchronized and after the first setup you can choose to sync via USB cable or Bluetooth. PC Suite supports synchronization with Outlook or Lotus Notes on a PC. On a Mac you can use Apple's iSync software to synchronize contacts, calendar and tasks, but only via Bluetooth.

Alerts (5.0)
Alerts on the Nokia N81 are similar to those found on all S60 devices. You can set alerts for appointments or tasks. The alert can be set to go off at any time that you wish, flexibility we appreciate. You can't choose which sound will go off for each item, instead your active profile will determine that. When an alert goes off the screen flashes and you see information on screen with the name and time of the item. You can dismiss or snooze the alert. If you choose the latter it will sound again in five minutes. A missed alert will automatically go into snooze mode after one minute.

Over the Air PIM Sync (0.0)
The Nokia N81 does not support synchronization of your personal information over the air out of the box. There is software available from Nokia that is meant for their E-Series business devices that will allow you to sync wirelessly with an Exchange Server, but as this is not installed on the device we won't award any points for it.

Address Book

Adding Contacts (6.04)

It took an average of 16.56 seconds to add a new contact to the Nokia N81. This is a pretty good time, you can see below that only the BlackBerry Pearl and Venus did slightly better than the Nokia N81 while several other phones did significantly worse, including the Nokia N95. To get our score we time how long it takes to go from the home screen unlocked until we have added a contact name and phone number. We do this for five different test contacts and take the average.

Cell Phone	Time (sec)	Score
Nokia N81 8GB	16.56	6.04
Nokia N95 w/ US 3G	25.42	3.93
Sidekick LX	19.58	5.11
BlackBerry Pearl 8130	14.85	6.73
T-Mobile Shadow	21.88	4.57
LG Venus	14.38	6.95

Looking/Sorting/Search (3.5)

The Nokia N81 allows you to sort your contacts by last name, first name or group. Search is only available via multi-tap on the keypad. This is disappointing as we hoped that the upgrades that have come to S60 lately might have included predictive search through contacts. Windows Mobile supports this, why can't S60?

Fields (13.6)
Like all S60 devices the Nokia N81 supports a wide range of contact fields. You have eleven fields when you first create a contact and have the additional option of adding any of 43 additional fields or a contact photo from the menu. This includes a very comprehensive set of fields, more than you'll find on most phones, and if any of those aren't enough you can change the name of any field to fit your needs.

Speed Dial/Voice tags/Voice command (3.0)
The Nokia N81 supports speed dial for contacts and also supports a voice dialing system. Unfortunately the latter is pretty poor, it was only able to recognize one of our five test contacts, which have diverse names. This makes it even more disappointing that trainable voice tags are not supported.

Calendar

Adding Calendar Items (5.21)

It took us an average of 19.2 seconds to add a lunch appointment to the Nokia N81 for the following day. This was timed starting at the home screen and ended when we had added our appointment with a reminder fifteen minutes beforehand. The Nokia N81's time in this test wasn't very impressive. You can see below that it's actually the worst time amongst our comparison phones, followed closely by the Nokia N95. We find that S60 phones are often slower than we would like because they don't add a reminder automatically. Instead we have to activate the option manually.

Cell Phone	Time (sec)	Score
Nokia N81 8GB	19.2	5.21
Nokia N95 w/ US 3G	18.64	5.36
Sidekick LX	12.44	8.04
BlackBerry Pearl 8130	6.61	15.13
T-Mobile Shadow	9.46	10.57
LG Venus	18.87	5.30

Calendar Views (4.22)

The Nokia N81 offers three different views, month, week and daily. The month view shows you the current month with a small triangle in the corner of every day that has an appointment. Unlike many month views that stop there the Nokia N81's helpfully gives you a small pop up listing all the appointment for that day when it is first selected. This makes it much more useful than the month view on other phones we've reviewed.

The week view is a standard grid with days along the top and hours on the left. Just like the month view you get a helpful little pop up when you select a block of time that has an appointment in it. The daily view is probably the easiest to use and where people will spend most of their time. It is a simple list of appointments for that day with the time, title and indicators for things like an alert. Unfortunately the calendar doesn't support categories so there's no way to filter your views. Despite this last bit, we found the calendar views on the Nokia N81 to be very useful and easy to use.

Fields (6.0)
When you create an appointment on the Nokia N81 you have a fairly basic set of fields to choose from. Title, location, start/end time, an alarm, recurrence are all on board. The alarm is very good because you can set it to go off at any time you wish. The recurrence options are not as good as you have to choose from a certain set of presets. This is not as good as Windows Mobile or BlackBerry devices that allow you to create complex recurrence patterns. We're also disappointed that advanced fields like categories and invitations are not supported.

ToDo/Tasks

Adding ToDo/Task (7.58)

It took 13.2 seconds to add a new task to the Nokia N81. As you can see below this is pretty typical, with all of our comparison devices within a second of the N81's score. With S60 devices tasks are handled by the calendar program. Starting at the home screen we scroll down to the calendar plugin, which takes us to today's appointments. We then scroll right to move to the next day, hit the left soft key to open the menu and choose to add a new task. Our task consists of a reminder to get groceries. We do this five times and take the average for our final score.

Cell Phone	Time (sec)	Score
Nokia N81 8GB	13.20	7.58
Nokia N95 w/ US 3G	12.38	8.08
Sidekick LX	14.30	6.99
BlackBerry Pearl 8130	14.19	7.05
T-Mobile Shadow	14.62	6.84
LG Venus	n/a - no tasks	0.00

ToDo/Task Sorting and Prioritizing (3.5)

Tasks on the Nokia N81 can be prioritized but they can't be sorted by priority. They also don't support categories so there's no way to filter your list of tasks.

Fields (5.0)
When creating a new task on the Nokia N81 the available fields are very basic. You have title, due date, alarm, description/note and priority. There's no support for categories or recurrence.

Notes

Adding Notes (3.36)

It took us an average of 14.9 seconds to add a new note to the Nokia N81, starting from the home screen and ending when our test note was created. We did this five times and took the average for our final score. This is not a very impressive time, you can see below that the Sidekick LX and BlackBerry Pearl 8130 both did significantly better. On the other hand we also had several of our comparison phones that did just as bad or worse, but company in failure does not mitigate it. The Nokia N81 was hurt in this test by the fact that the notes application is buried in the menu system, and even using keypad shortcuts it took us awhile to get the program launched. Once there typing out the note on the keypad just isn't as fast as the QWERTY keyboards on the Pearl or Sidekick.

Cell Phone	Time (sec)	Score
Nokia N81 8GB	14.9	3.36
Nokia N95 w/ US 3G	17.7	2.82
Sidekick LX	8.28	6.04
BlackBerry Pearl 8130	9.25	5.41
T-Mobile Shadow	14.76	3.39
LG Venus	18.86	2.65

Note Interface (2.0)

The notes interface on the Nokia N81 is exceedingly simple. You have a simple list of notes with the newest one at the top of the list. The time the note was created is indicated on the left and the first twelve or so characters are shown so you can try to figure out what's in the note. Unfortunately there are no options to categorize, filter or otherwise sort your notes. You also can't search through them, as you can on BlackBerry devices. Unimpressive would be our thought here.

Note Formatting (0.0)
The Nokia N81 doesn't offer any options to format notes by adding things like media, changing font type or size or other effects like underline, italics or bold.

Voice Memo (3.0)
The voice recorder on the Nokia N81 is the same one we've seen on all S60 devices we've reviewed, which isn't good. The voice note is limited to one minute in length and you'll need to switch to the gallery to manage your voice notes rather than having one program handle all the functions. You can send notes via MMS or Bluetooth and upload them to the web as well as make simple edits like change the name of the last created note. If all you want to do is take a quick voice memo this will do the job, but if you want to use your phone as a serious recording device you better go get some third party software.

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