Nokia N81 8GB Cell Phone Review - Software
OS (8.0)
The Nokia N81 runs the Symbian operating system with Nokia's Series 60 (S60) interface. This is a powerful smart phone operating system and the most widely used world wide, despite not being very popular in the US. S60 has its bad points, we find that the menus tend to be large and ungainly and on many devices it tends to be somewhat slow. We're happy to see that the latter issue has been addressed on the Nokia N81, even if the former has not.
For the third time in as many years Nokia has decided that the multimedia menu needs a revamp, this time deciding on a rotating set of "tiles", each of which is a small menu giving you access to certain key features of various programs. These include music, games, gallery, contacts, internet and maps. We appreciate that Nokia has gone to the effort of trying to improve the multimedia menu interface through several iterations, but in the end we're not sure that creating an alternate interface for the operating system is a viable replacement for simplifying the overall interface of S60.
Complaints about the multimedia menu, and other menus for that matter, aside Symbian Series 60 is fairly easy to use, powerful and very extensible. There's a reason it's the most popular smart phone operating system in the world.
Home Screen Score (7.0)
The Nokia N81 uses the same Active Standby screen that Nokia has been using for S60 devices for awhile now. This home screen is similar to the Windows Mobile Today screen in that it brings together information from various programs along with shortcuts to commonly used applications in a single place. The top quarter of the screen contains indicators for time, battery life, signal strength, carrier and profile. Below this is a line of six application shortcuts, which can be user-defined. Below that are the plugins for various programs including search, calendar, tasks, Wi-Fi and music. We only wish that third parties had invested in developing for the S60 Active Standby screen as much as Windows Mobile developers have. On devices like the T-Mobile Shadow you have a variety of programs that can add or expand the functionality of the home screen. On the Nokia N81 you will be hard pressed to find any third party applications that leverage the power of the Active Standby screen.
Extensibility (8.0)
The Symbian Series 60 platform that runs on the Nokia N81 is one of the most extensible platforms out there. Not only are there many native third party applications available but the platform also runs java applications like Opera Mini transparently, without the messy emulators that you find on many Windows Mobile devices.
Customizability (7.0)
The Nokia N81 is a very customizable phone. You can re-assign shortcuts on the home screen, move around programs in the application menu and switch between themes that change the whole look and feel of the device. You can also change the font size to one of three sizes and set the background of your home screen to any image you want.
OS Responsivness (7.0)
The responsiveness of the interface has been a problem with previous S60 devices we've reviewed. The principal problem was the penurious amount of RAM that Nokia put on these powerful devices. Thankfully Nokia have changed their ways and the Nokia N81 is one of a new generation of devices with twice the RAM found on previous S60 phones. In practice this means you have as much as four times the free RAM at boot-up since the OS takes up about the same space, plus there have been some improvements in efficiency. The result is one of the fastest and most responsive S60 devices we've ever seen. The Nokia N81 rarely lags as programs launch quickly. The added RAM also improves multi-tasking as you will rarely, if ever, see an out of memory error on this device.
Browser Features (11.0)
Sybmian Series 60 (S60) devices have one of the best web browsers found on any device. Although the interface is not quite as good as Safari on the iPhone, as we'll discuss below, the support for web technologies is much better. You can view both HTML and WAP pages, javascript, frames, atom and rss feeds, encryption and cookies are all supported. You can also save web pages to your device and manage passwords for websites. Finally, unlike almost every other mobile browser out there, Web on S60 supports Flash, at least to a limited extent. The support extends to Flash pages like homestarrunner.com, but you can't watch Flash video as found on Youtube. This support is said to be coming in the near future, but even without it you have one of the best mobile web browsers out there.
Browsing Interface (9.5)
The browser interface on the Nokia N81 is also one of the best out there. It's only serious competition is Safari on the iPhone, which edges it out by just a little simply because it's easier to view a web page on a larger screen. What both of these browsers do is allow you to browser full sized web pages on a mobile device. Web on the Nokia N81 renders full web pages and then uses a clever mini-map that gives you an overview of the page so you can zoom in on the specific section you want. This is an excellent solution to how you get full sized web pages on small screens.
Web also has a few new tricks up its sleeve. If you press and hold the center select key on the D-Pad you will get a small menu that gives you quick access to your history, the page overview mode, reloading or searching the page. History on Web is great because it actually saves small thumbnails of the pages you've visited so you can go back and see the pages themselves rather than just the URLs. We also like the bookmark system, which is flexible and powerful and includes useful tools like a folder for RSS feeds and another that saves recently visited URLs.
With older generation S60 devices our biggest gripe with Web was that the limited RAM meant that after browsing just a couple of web pages the thing would shut down because there just wasn't enough memory left. With the new increased RAM on the Nokia N81 this is no longer a problem and you don't have to do things like turn off visual history and only used mobile sites to get any kind of web browsing done. This means our only remaining gripe with Web is the menu system. Like many menus in S60 devices its overly large with too many sub-menus. We'd like some simplification here. There are keypad shortcuts available for many of the popular items, however, which makes things a little easier, but you have to have the keypad open on the N81 to access them.
Despite any gripes, Web on the Nokia N81 is one of the best mobile web browsers we've seen. Even the iPhone could do with learning a few tricks from it.
Browser Access (4.44)
It takes nine steps on the Nokia N81 to open the web browser and point it to a specific page. In our case we browsed to Wirelessinfo.com, counting steps from the home screen unlocked until we were looking at our page. We count entering the URL as a single step. The Nokia N81's performance in this test is not particularly good. There is a shortcut to the web browser on the home screen, but we had to use up three steps navigating over to it and launching the browser. Once there we had to open the left soft key menu, choose the option to enter a web address, then open up the keypad so we could enter it. We use steps in this test instead of a timed test because we don't want network issues to interfere.
Gaming (8.0)
The Nokia N81 is one of the launch phones for Nokia's new N-Gage gaming platform. Unfortunately the platform is not yet available to us here in the US, but there are a few demonstration games that show what it's capable of. We have to say that we're pretty impressed. In the words of one of our staff-writers who's something of a gaming geek the graphics are about Playstation 1 level. Not quite as good as a Nintendo DS, but much better than what we've seen from any other phone. We found the controls on the Nokia N81 to be well suited for gaming. The D-Pad is fairly large, comfortable to use and responsive. When held horizontally with the D-Pad on the left, as we found we had to with the demonstration games, we had four buttons available to use, the two soft keys and two more flanking the speaker at the left/top of the phone. The library of N-Gage games will be small initially, but we fully expect it to grow quickly as Nokia has invested a lot into this platform. In the meantime you can play a wide variety of native third party applications and java games on the Nokia N81.
Calculator (5.0)
The calculator on the Nokia N81 is typical S60 fare, which means unimpressive. The interface is clunky, we prefer phones that assign arithmetic functions to the D-Pad instead of forcing us to navigate about to find the function we want on screen. Aside from the standard plus, minus, multiply, divide you only get a couple of other functions like square root and percentages.
Alarm (8.0)
We've complained about the old S60 alarm program for so long now that it almost feels surreal to praise the alarm on an S60 device, but that's just what we're going to do. Unlike the single alarm that goes off every day at one time the new alarm program as found on the Nokia N81 allows you to create multiple alarms with the option to add recurrence patterns. Although the patterns aren't particularly impressive, you can choose from daily, weekly or weekdays, they should be sufficient for most people. All we can say is it's about time.
Document Software (1.0)
For some strange reason the Nokia N81 lacks the Quickoffice file viewers that are found on all other S60 devices we've heard of. This means that you can't view Word, Excel and Powerpoint files out of the box. Instead you'll have to go out and purchase a program to fulfill this task. We're not happy about this, viewing office documents should be a standard feature of any advanced smart phone and the fact that the Nokia N81 lacks it is just stupid. On the plus side you can view PDF documents using Adobe's software, which is installed and just makes our annoyance at the lack of other document viewers even greater.
Other Software (4.0)
In addition to the software we discuss above there are a couple of other pieces of software found on the Nokia N81 that we thought were worth a few extra points. First up is the search functionality that allows you to search through multiple data types on your phone and the web simultaneously, with matches showing up as you type and predictive text on by default. This almost makes up for the lack of predictive text search in the contacts application.
Second up is Nokia's maps program. Although we personally prefer Google Maps, which can be had for free if you want it, the Nokia Maps application does a reasonable job and when paired with a Bluetooth GPS receiver and their pay service can provide turn by turn directions in addition to basic map functionality like local search and directions. Other programs of note are a file manager and Nokia Lifeblogger software.
