Nokia N82 Cell Phone Review - Messaging

Alfredo Padilla
Published on February 05, 2008 Comment on this

Supported Email Services (6.0)
Like all Series 60 devices from Nokia the N82 supports both POP3 and IMAP4 email accounts. Unfortunately the N82 won't automatically set up popular services like Gmail or Yahoo for you, instead you'll need to have all the server settings to set them up manually.

Push Email (0.0)
Out of the box the Nokia N82 doesn't support any push email services, which allow you to receive your email at the moment they arrive. You can find free clients from Nokia to install support for various push email services like Exchange Activesync or BlackBerry. Because we score phones on how they come out of the box the N82 won't receive any points in this section.

Multiple Email Accounts (10.0)
The Nokia N82 can support at least five different email accounts, and probably several more. This is an important factor for those who want to keep up to date with multiple email accounts.

HTML and Attachements (8.5)
As we've seen on other Series 60 phones the Nokia N82 doesn't handle HTML email in the email program. Instead HTML email will be turned into plain text. You will find an attachment that can be opened in the web browser and allows you to view an HTML email in the way it was meant to be viewed, but this is a clunky workaround compared to the native HTML email support we see from Windows Mobile 6 devices and the iPhone. We were pleased to see that the Nokia N82 has the view only version of Quickoffice on board so you can view Word, Excel and Powerpoint attachments. You can also view PDF attachments using the included Adobe PDF viewer and zip files also have a program on board so you can open them up. This is significantly better than the Nokia N81 that lacked these features, which we had found disappointing.

Email Customizations (2.0)
The Nokia N82 doesn't offer you many email customization options. You can add signatures to emails, but you can't change viewing/composing font or change the number of lines each email takes up in your inbox.

Time to a New Message (4.18)

The Nokia N82 took an average of 4.78 seconds to get a new email dialogue open when starting from the home screen. This is not a particularly good score, we were actually surprised that it was significantly worse than what we saw from the Nokia N81, which took only 2.5 seconds. It's also slower than all of our other comparison phones, as you can see below. We found that we encountered quite a bit of lag when launching the email program and then again when trying to open the new message dialogue. This should be tempered somewhat if you keep the email program running in the background, but if you are launching it for the first time as we do for our tests you'll have to wait a bit.

Cell Phone	Time (sec)	Score
Nokia N82	4.78	4.18
Nokia N81 8GB	2.5	8.00
BlackBerry Pearl 8130	1.22	16.39
Palm Centro	1.86	10.75
Razr2 V8	n/a - no email client	0.00
Apple iPhone	1.9	10.53

Email Usability (6.0)

The Nokia N82's email program is the standard Series 60 email client. It's integrated into the general messaging application with each email account given its own inbox but shared sent items, drafts and other folders. You are initially shown a list of available mailboxes. When you open one you can then navigate between boxes by moving left/right on the D-Pad. This is a nice quick way to get between different accounts or mailboxes and is much better than what we saw on the Palm Centro where you have to go into the menu system to switch accounts.

Messages are in a list with an icon showing its status, and information about the sender and subject. Unfortunately the type is a little big so not much can be fit onto the screen. We prefer Windows Mobile's approach that shrinks the text down more so you can get more information at once. Up/down on the D-Pad will move you up and down the list and pressing in on the select key will open the currently selected message. The right soft key is alternately assigned to the Exit/Back/Cancel function while the left soft key opens menus where you can access functions like deletion, forward, etc. You can also delete a currently selected message by hitting the "C" button when it is open. All in all it's a decent setup but we've seen better from BlackBerry and Windows Mobile devices.

Supported IM Services (0.0)
The Nokia N82 supports a Jabber client out of the box, but doesn't support any of the more popular services like AIM, Yahoo, Windows Live or Google Talk. We don't award points for Jabber so the Nokia N82 will receive a zero in this section.

MMS Support (7.0)

MMS support on the Nokia N82 is strong, as we've come to expect from Series 60 devices. MMS is integrated well into both the camera and the album software, allowing you to easily send a picture or video message from either. The unified messaging application uses a single inbox for both MMS and regular text messages, but unfortunately you still have to decide what type of message to send before you begin composing. This is the one remaining serious drawback for MMS on Series 60, we much prefer platforms like the Palm Centro's messaging application where you can easily turn a text message into an MMS message by simply adding media. Aside from this issue, though, the N82's MMS performance is solid.

SMS Smiley Face Interpretation (0.0)
Alas none of the recent spate of updates to the Series 60 platform have brought support for smiley faces. Our quest continues.

SMS/MMS Ease of Use (6.0)

As we've mentioned above SMS and MMS messages on the Nokia N82 are part of the unified messaging application, with both message types sharing a single inbox. What they don't share is a composition interface, but we've expressed our annoyance with that in the MMS Support section above. Like the email interface you are given a simple list of messages when you enter the inbox. The left soft key is used to open a menu where you can access various functions, while up/down on the D-Pad moves between messages. The interface is fairly straightforward, but we are missing features like threaded conversations. Although it compares well to SMS/MMS support on most regular phones or Windows Mobile devices it's just not up to the level of the excellent Palm OS messaging feature as found on the Centro.

Time to a New SMS Message (8.47)

The Nokia N82 posted a pretty impressive time of 1.18 seconds to get a new text message dialogue up starting from the home screen. Like the Nokia N81, which put up a slightly better score, the N82 was helped by the fact that the second icon on it's Active Standby screen is assigned to create a new text message. We simply used the D-Pad to move over once and then hit the select key to launch it. This is a boon for those who love to text message, although those who don't will be happy to know that this can be changed. You can see below that the Palm Centro also beat out the N82, but the difference between those two handsets was significantly less than between them and poorer performers like the BlackBerry Pearl 8130.

Cell Phone	Time (sec)	Score
Nokia N82	1.18	8.47
Nokia N81 8GB	0.9	11.11
BlackBerry Pearl 8130	4.78	2.09
Palm Centro	0.86	11.63
Razr2 V8	1.99	5.03
Apple iPhone	2.62	3.82

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