Nokia N82 Cell Phone Review - Conclusion
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Alfredo Padilla Published on February 05, 2008 Comment on this |
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Who's It For
Business User
Business users who want an excellent multimedia handset may consider the N82, but we feel like the lack of a QWERTY keyboard, limitations in the PIM applications and the rather mundane email interface don't make it a good choice for business users who depend on mobile email.
Budget Callers
Time to go look at the Palm Centro.
Chatty Teenager
The combination of high price and a poor keypad for typing out a lot of messages probably make the N82 the wrong choice for chatty teenagers.
Media Maven
This is where the N82 will make people salivate. The excellent five megapixel camera that takes excellent photos and video combined with excellent music playback capabilities make this a handset that many media mavens will salivate over. Whether they're willing to pay the premium to get those features is another question, but if you are we can heartily recommend the N82.
Conclusion
The Nokia N82 is not an upgrade to any specific device in Nokia's lineup. It can be thought of as the Nokia N72 on steroids or the Nokia N95 in a candybar form factor. Either way it will probably represent the sweet spot in Nokia's N-Series lineup as the N70 and N73 did before. The N82 is a multimedia powerhouse, sporting a very good five megapixel auto-focus camera and excellent video recording capabilities. In addition it ups the ante over other high end Nokia camera phones by adding a much better Xenon flash. Under the hood the N82 runs the Symbian smart phone operating system with Nokia's Series 60 interface. This gives users a large amount of flexibility and power, with the ability to install a wide variety of native third party applications. On the hardware side you have built in Wi-Fi and GPS capabilities.
On the surface the N82 seems like close to the perfect all-in-one device, but it does have its flaws, mostly on the hardware side. We found the old timey calculator style keypad to be very annoying to use and the button layout is hindered by the overly prominent multimedia key. The D-Pad also leaves something to be desired as it is prone to errors because of an overly prominent center select button. Finally it lacks support for U.S. 3G frequencies, so if you're out of Wi-Fi range you'll be stuck with the slower EDGE connection.
If you can get past these usability issues, though, the N82 should be on your short list for a multimedia powerhouse phone. As the N82 isn't available from any U.S. carriers you will be paying for the privilege. Nokia USA has not yet released the N82 for sale in the U.S. but you will pay around $550 from importers and we don't expect Nokia's price to be much better. If you're not a media maven you can save a lot of money by looking at other devices like the AT&T Tilt or BlackBerry Pearl 8130 that provide many of the N82's same features at a much lower price. If you do want a multimedia device the N82 is probably going make you salivate, just be prepared to dig deep into your pockets.
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