Nokia N82 Cell Phone Review - Multimedia

Alfredo Padilla
Published on February 05, 2008 Comment on this

Accessing Music Software (2.65)

We found getting music playing on the Nokia N82 was rather slow, taking an average of 7.54 seconds. This is the slowest time amongst our comparison phones, but a pretty decent margin. You can see that the Nokia N81, with its dedicated music buttons, was able to get music playing in less than one third the time. To get music playing on the Nokia N82 you have a couple of choices, you can go in through the multimedia menu or enter the standard menu to launch the application. We found in our tests that it was faster to do the latter, despite the fact that it required more clicks to get a song playing. This is because the multimedia menu was pretty slow to load and music launched from it was also very slow to load. Using the multimedia menu it took us about nine seconds to get a song playing, which makes us wonder what the point of the multimedia menu is, but we'll get to that in software section. If you intend to use the Nokia N82 as your principal music device we recommend that you add a shortcut to the music application to your home menu for easier access and keep the music software playing in the background so it launches more quickly.

Cell Phone	Time (sec)	Score
Nokia N82	7.54	2.65
Nokia N81 8GB	2.8	7.14
BlackBerry Pearl 8130	6.13	3.26
Palm Centro	3.22	6.21
Razr2 V8	5.86	3.41
Apple iPhone	3.1	6.45

Dedicated Music Controls (3.0)

Unlike the Nokia N81 or N95, both of which have several dedicated buttons for music playback, the N82 lacks these. Instead you can control music volume while it's playing from anywhere in the interface using the volume keys. You also have the typical Series 60 home screen plugin while music is playing that allows you to quickly get back to the music software. The multimedia key that is now found on N-Series devices also has a tab for music playback, although this would be more useful if it took you directly to the music tab when music was playing instead of always taking you to the gallery tab. To be fair this can be changed to take you to the music tab in the settings and it does give you a third point of entry for getting to music playback in addition to the home screen plugin and the application menu. That being said it's nowhere near as convenient as the dedicated music playback keys we've seen on other Series 60 devices.

Music Software Functionality and Organization (8.8)

The music software on the Nokia N82 is the typical Series 60 goodness. Playlists are supported, including the ability to create and edit playlists right on your device. All the tags for our Mp3, AAC and WMA files were recognized by the software. You can view music by title, artist, album, genre or composer. We're also happy to see search capabilities, although we are still annoyed by the fact that you can't use predictive text to search, instead being forced to use multi-tap. Album art is supported, but only if the artwork is embedded into the music file. Artwork found in the same folder as a music file won't be picked up. Visualizations are supported, as is background play and automatic scanning of your device for music files. What isn't supported is rating your music. We were happy to see support for an equalizer, however, including the ability to create your own preset as well as the ability to choose from a variety of presets. Overall we found the music software to be amongst the best we've seen on a mobile device, it even compares favorably to the excellent music playback capabilities of the iPhone.

Online Song Downloading (0.0)

Nokia has said it expects to launch their online music store in the United States sometime soon, but as of the writing of this review they have not done so, as such the Nokia N82 does not receive any points in this section.

Streaming (0.0)
As we've seen from other other Series 60 devices the Nokia N82 does not support streaming audio in Mp3, Windows Media or Real Audio formats.

Podcast Support (7.0)

We are very pleased to see that Nokia has finally incorporated their excellent podcasting software into their devices out of the box instead of making people download it as a separate application. This also means that we can finally reward Nokia for creating very good podcasting software, with the ability to subscribe, download and playback podcasts directly on your device. One particular feature we like is that you can set the software up with a schedule to download your podcast updates at a certain time. So, for example, you could tell it to download our updated podcasts at 6:00 AM using your home's Wi-Fi network, so when you get up and walk out the door you have all of your updated podcasts in your pocket. The ability to download podcasts directly to your device is better functionality than what we see from the iPhone, where you have to synchronize with iTunes to update your podcasts.

Music Sync with PC (7.0)
Synchronization with a PC can be accomplished either by using Nokia's PC Suite or, more reliably and effortlessly, by using Windows Media Player to synchronize music with your device. For Mac users you can download Nokia's free Multimedia Transfer software that will allow you to synchronize with iTunes, although you won't be able to synchronize iTunes protected music. Because this software isn't included on the CD in the box we won't be awarding points for it.

Music Formats and DRM (0.0)
The Nokia N82 supports AAC, Mp3, and WMA audio files. It will support music files protected with Microsoft's PlaysForSure DRM, used by many music stores like Rhapsody, Napster and Nokia's own store. It does not support iTunes protected music.

Music Interruption (0.0)
The Nokia N82 does a solid job when music is interrupted by an incoming call. The music is paused when the phone starts ringing and starts up again when the call ends. About the only thing we wish it could do was add a nice fade in/out at each end, like the iPhone does.

Video

Video Software Access (3.70)

Getting a video playing on the Nokia N82 took an average of 5.4 seconds, which isn't the speediest we've seen but isn't terribly slow either, as you can see below. We found the fastest way to get a video playing was by going in through the gallery program using the dedicated button on the right side of the phone to launch it. You could also use the multimedia menu, go in through the standard menu system to launch Realplayer and open a video from there or use the Video Center software, but all of these methods were significantly slower than using the gallery software. We were actually surprised to see that launching video on the N82 was faster than launching music.

Cell Phone	Time (sec)	Score
Nokia N82	5.4	3.70
Nokia N81 8GB	5.8	3.45
BlackBerry Pearl 8130	6.98	2.87
Palm Centro	3.16	6.33
Razr2 V8	7.3	2.74
Apple iPhone	3.2	6.25

Video Controls (4.0)
Video playback on the Nokia N82 is handled by Realplayer, an application we've never been particularly impressed by. Instead of having some kind of logical control layout like Windows Media Player Mobile on Windows Mobile devices where up/down on the D-Pad is assigned to volume and left/right are assigned to the previous and next tracks, Realplayer eschews these conventions and chooses to assign seemingly random functions to the controls. We're not sure what the reasoning behind having the center select key, left soft key and right soft key fulfill almost exactly the same function. We also don't understand why up/down is used to fast forward rewind when left/right have no functions assigned to them. At least the volume keys control volume.

Video Software & Organization (1.0)
Let's make this simple, there is none. Nokia expects you to use the Gallery software to organize your videos, but this is a poor choice as the Gallery doesn't help you keep videos organized by type, title, artist or anything else for that matter. You can create folders and manually move stuff into them. When you're in Realplayer itself things are no better, with no library structure at all. You basically have to go find your video in the guts of the file structure. Control freaks may like this, but most of us normal human beings expect software to, you know, make things easier on us.

Video Sync with PC (7.0)
Video synchronization is handled by Windows Media Player on the PC side, with some optional help from PC Suite if you want it, we recommend you decline.

Video Formats (6.0)
The Nokia N82 was able to handle all three of our test 3GP files, Mpeg-4, H264 and Real encoded video. It wasn't able to handle Windows Media, Flash or Quicktime videos.

Video DRM (0.0)
Unlike music where the Nokia N82 supports Microsoft's DRM scheme there is no support for any form of video DRM, either Microsoft's, Apple's or Real's. This means you won't be able to purchase any DRM protected video content from stores like iTunes or Amazon's Unboxed and expect it to work on the Nokia N82.

Video Playback Smoothness (10.0)
We were pleased to see that the Nokia N82 was able to handle all five of the test clips we use to see how smoothly video plays on the device. These clips are encoded in Mpeg-4 up to a maximum bitrate of 768 kbps. This means you will be able to watch high-quality video on the Nokia N82.

Online Video Downloading (0.0)
The Nokia N82 doesn't support direct downloading of premium video content to the device.

Video Streaming unscored
We don't score this area because we don't feel that streaming video to mobile devices has been standardized enough for us to make firm judgements on what is and isn't supported. That being said we do test out a few sites for your information. The Nokia N82 was able to handle streaming 3GP video from both Zoovision.com and Youtube's mobile website, but it was not able to handle streaming Windows Media Video from Windowsmedia.com.

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