Nokia N82 Cell Phone Review - Intro
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Alfredo Padilla Published on February 05, 2008 Comment on this |
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The Nokia N82 is the latest do everything handset from the Finnish cell phone giant. Like many of its other high end handsets the N82 isn't available from any U.S. carrier, instead you'll have to purchase the phone from an importer or directly from Nokia when they make it available. The N82 packs a lot of technology into a reasonably small candybar form factor. You'll be getting a five megapixel camera with Xenon flash, a smart phone running Symbian Series 60, Wi-Fi and GPS functionality. Most of these features are well integrated and easy to use. That's not to say that the Nokia N82 doesn't have its bad points as well. On the negative side you'll find that the N82 has some problems with buttons and controls. In particular we found both the D-Pad and the 1960's calculator style keypad to be fiddly to use and prone to errors. In addition the handset's multimedia key is poorly placed and caused even more errors. If you can get past these issues you'll be getting one of the most powerful phones on the market, but expect to pay for it. As of the writing of this review the N82 was selling for around $550 from various importers.
Tour & Design - The N82 is a medium sized phone with plastic construction that makes it light, but also feels a little less durable than we would have liked.
Audio Quality - The N82 didn't do as well in our Audio tests as we would have liked, with average to below average scores across the board.
Imaging - The N82's five megapixel camera didn't score as well as the N95's, but is still amongst the best we've seen while video recording was excellent.
Making/Receiving Calls - The Nokia N82's call features were solid, but we found the keypad to be a little fiddly and prone to errors.
Messaging - The Nokia N82's messaging application does a solid job, but it isn't as good as a BlackBerry or Windows Mobile device.
Organizer - the Organizer features are solid but a few omissions like the lack of predictive search for contacts and no category support for appointments make it fall short of other smart phone platforms.
Multimedia - As always Nokia does a solid job in the music playback department but Realplayer is still sub par video playback software.
Software - Sybmian Series 60 is a powerful and mature platform, but we find the overly complex menus to be annoying.
Battery Life - The Nokia N82 performed solidly in our battery tests, especially in music playback.
Connectivity - There's Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0 with a good selection of profiles but we are missing support for U.S. 3G networks.
Hardware - The N82 has several hardware flaws including a fiddly keypad, error prone D-Pad and a poorly placed multimedia key.
Other Features - The Nokia N82 sports GPS functionality with solid software backing it up and can be used as an FM radio and modem for your PC as well.
Value & Comparisons - At around $550 for an unlocked device the Nokia N82 matches its high end feature set with a high end price.
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