Nokia N82 Cell Phone Review - Software
OS (8.0)
The Nokia N82 runs the latest version of Nokia's Series 60 (S60) interface running atop Symbian. This is the most popular smart phone operating system in the world, mostly due to Nokia's dominance in the market, and despite some flaws it provides a powerful and flexible platform for cell phone users. Our biggest issues with S60 have to do with the user interface. In particular, items like overly large menus, a kludgy and confusing "multimedia" menu (that's in its third iteration in the past couple of years), and the lack of features we expect from advanced platforms like predictive search in contacts and decent video playback software.
Issues like these aside S60 has seem some significant improvements lately like implementation of demand paging in the memory system and the addition of systemwide search tools. It still lags behind other platforms in some areas, such as organizer software, but these shortfalls tend to be minor issues and the overall package is strong. The N82 also sports some nice touches like a built in accelerometer that will automatically rotate the interface when you rotate the device, like the iPhone, although this doesn't work everywhere in the interface. Our score for advanced and popular operating systems like S60 are standardized.
Home Screen Score (7.0)
The Nokia N82's home screen uses the now standard Active Standby screen that Nokia first introduced a couple of years back. This screen mimics the Windows Mobile Today screen by placing important information and shortcuts all in one place. At the top of the screen you have indicators for battery life, signal strength, time and profile, along with other indicators that pop up when they are needed like voice mail. Below these is a line of six shortcuts that can be customized by the user. Your options for shortcuts include both programs and functions, for example creating a new SMS message.
Below the shortcuts you find various plugins that provide information like calendar appointments, tasks, Wi-Fi status and Nokia's new system wide search. There are also plugins that only appear when you need them, for example when the music application is active you'll see a plugin for music appear here. We have to say that we're disappointed that N-Series devices like the N82 don't support the useful email plugin that is found on Nokia's E-Series devices. You'll also find that although the architecture for these home screen plugins is open not many developers have taken advantage of it to create their own plugins. This is in sharp contrast to Windows Mobile where you can find many programs that add useful functionality to the home screen.
The last thing you'll find on the home screen are the labels for the two soft keys at the bottom of the screen. By default the Nokia N82 assigns these to Messaging and Maps, but users can reassign them if they wish. The ability to make these shortcuts as well as the line of shortcuts found near the top of the home screen make it very customizable. You also have the choice to switch between an analog and digital clock and change the background to any photo you wish. Finally, for those who just don't want the Active Standby interface you can turn the whole thing off and go to a more standard cell phone home screen that gets rid of the line of shortcuts and plugins and replaces them with a set of program shortcuts that can be assigned using up/down/left/right on the D-Pad. We have to say we prefer the power and flexibility of the Active Standby screen.
Extensibility (8.0)
The Symbian Series 60 platform that the Nokia N82 runs is one of the most extensible out there. Not only are there thousands of native third party applications available for it but the platform also does a very good job of handling Java applications, running them transparently rather than forcing you to use an emulator like Windows Mobile devices do. This combination means that you're very likely to find an application out there to fit your needs.
Customizability (7.0)
We've already talked about the customization options on the home screen, including the ability to change shortcuts and the background. What the Nokia N82 is missing compared to Windows Mobile Professional devices is the ability to turn individual plugins on or off as we like, for example you can't turn off the calendar plugin if you don't want it taking up space. The Nokia N82 does support themes, with a large variety of both free and pay themes available to change the look and feel of the device.
Aside from the home screen the Nokia N82's provides users with the ability to customize their applications menu, creating new folders and moving icons around as you wish. This is built into the interface, which is a nice touch compared to Windows Mobile phones that require you to do this via the file structure. You can also customize the multimedia menu by moving tiles around so they're in the order you want. In practice most will probably use this to move their most commonly used tile to the front of the list so that's what you see when you launch the menu.
One feature that's missing from Series 60 devices like the Nokia N82 is the ability to reassign the functions assigned to your hardware keys. Windows Mobile devices have been able to do this for years, but with the N82 you're stuck with whatever Nokia thinks is best. This, and other issues, aside the Nokia N82 does provide users with a pretty decent selection of customization options, but power users may find the more hackable Windows Mobile platform might better serve their needs (wants).
OS Responsivness (7.0)
The responsiveness of the interface has been a concern in previous Series 60 devices we've reviewed, including the Nokia N73 and the original N95. Thankfully the Nokia N82 is one of a new generation of devices that has double the RAM of previous Series 60 phones. Because the requirements of the operating system haven't changed this means you actually have almost four times the free RAM on the Nokia N82 than you would have found on the Nokia N73. In fact you may find even more because another update, demand-paging, will only load those parts of the operating system that you need, so the OS actually takes up less room. The result of all this is that the Nokia N82 feels like a very responsive device. You will find that you get the best experience by keeping programs you use a lot open in the background, as a smart phone it can multi-task, so when you need them they come up almost instantaneously. This is especially helpful for programs like the gallery or music player that, despite the upgrades to RAM, are still a little sluggish to start up.
Browser Features (11.0)
The Nokia N82 comes with the typical Series 60 Web to surf the internet, and this is good as Web is one of the best mobile browsers out there. From a web technologies perspective Web does a pretty solid job. It supports HTML and WAP pages as well as javascript, frames RSS feeds, encryption and cookies. Password management and the ability to save web pages or images to your devices is also supported, as is a limited form of Flash. We should talk a little more about Flash support, on the Nokia N82 we have in our hands this support is limited in that streaming flash video as found on Youtube is not supported. However, Nokia has recently released an update for the N95 handsets that enables this feature, so its entirely possible that the Nokia N82 will also see this update soon. Websites that run on Flash like Homestarrunner.com will work even without this update. With our without this update the Nokia N82's web browser is one of the most impressive in terms of features out there. It's better than the iPhone's Safari that lacks support for Flash, password management and RSS feeds.
Browsing Interface (9.5)
Like Safari on the iPhone Web allows you to view full web pages as you would see them on your desktop. Web pages are rendered and you are then offered an overview, or "mini-map", of the page and a small box that you can move around and zoom into the area of the screen you want. Although not as elegant as the touch interface on the iPhone's Safari it still works well and allows users to get around complicated web pages quickly and easily.
Pressing and holding in the center select key on the D-Pad will bring up a small pop-up menu that allows you to access features like history, the mini-map and searching the page. We also like that there are a variety of keyboard shortcuts to access common functions, for instance pressing 8 will also bring up the mini-map and pressing 1 will bring up your bookmarks. Unfortunately these are not user customizable, but they are still very helpful. This is important because the menu system in Web, like those in many S60 applications, is overly large and confusing. Pressing the left soft key to bring up the menu gives you 13 options, with many of these taking you to further sub menus. This is probably the biggest annoyance about Web.
We were also happy to see that the increase in RAM on the Nokia N82, like the N81 and newer N95s, makes Web a much more stable application than on older Nokia phones. On those devices you would inevitably run out of memory as large web pages were cached, but on the Nokia N82 you will rarely, if ever, run into this problem. This lets you take full advantage of features like the visual history that shows you your history as a carousel of thumbnails of the pages you've navigated. This makes what was already an impressive piece of software into a very usable one as well. Despite the annoyance of the menu system we still have to consider Web on the Nokia N82 to be one of the best mobile web browsers out there. We like Safari's navigation interface better, but Web provides much more powerful tools.
Browser Access (6.67)
It took six steps to go from the home screen on the Nokia N82 until we were able to browse to our website. We count typing the URL as a single step. This is significantly better than what we saw on the N81 where it took nine steps because the Web shortcut took longer to navigate to and once in the browser we didn't have immediate access to the keypad so we had to add a step to use the 9 button as a shortcut to enter an address. The Nokia N82's is more in line with what we've seen from other devices, as you can see below, although it still lags a couple of steps behind Safari on the iPhone. We use steps in this test instead of a timed test because we don't want network issues to interfere with the test.
Gaming (6.67)
Like the Nokia N81 the N82 supports Nokia's new N-Gage gaming platform. Although this platform hasn't officially rolled out yet the handset does come with some demonstration games pre-loaded, and we have to say we were pretty impressed with the quality and performance of the games. It's not as good as a PSP or other dedicated gaming devices, but it's the best we've seen from a cell phone. Aside from N-Gage there are also a wide variety of native and java games available that you can download and install. The controls on the Nokia N82 are not as good for gaming as what we saw on the N81. The D-Pad on the N82 feels a bit squishy and we found ourselves hitting the center select key a little too often when we actually wanted to move up/down/left/right. The N82 also lacks the additional buttons near the top of the screen that can be used by N-Gage games.
Calculator (5.0)
The Nokia N82's calculator is typical S60 fare, which means it's fine for basic arithmetic functions but don't expect it to replace a scientific calculator. One point of annoyance is the interface that requires you to use the D-Pad to navigate between icons for the various functions. Given how simple the calculator is we wonder why they didn't just assign the functions to the four directions of the D-Pad as calculators on other phones do.
Alarm (8.0)
Alarm functionality on Series 60 devices has come a long way from the days where you could only set a single alarm that goes off every day at the same time. Now devices like the Nokia N82 allow you to create multiple alarms that can be set to go off day, weekly or on weekdays. We would still like some more options for recurrence, for example Windows Mobile Professional devices let you create your own complex recurrence pattern for alarms, but having any recurrence options is a major step up.
Document Software (4.0)
When we reviewed the Nokia N81 we were very disappointed to find that the typical view only version of Quickoffice was not on the device. This meant there was no native support for viewing Word, Excel and Powerpoint files. We are thankful that the Nokia N82 doesn't continue this trend as Quickoffice is back, giving you the requisite document viewing capabilities. Also on board are a PDF viewer so you should be able to view just about any file you need to on the N82. For those who need editing capabilities you'll have to upgrade Quickoffice, which you can do right in the application, at a cost of $42 for the latest version.
Other Software (4.0)
The Nokia N82 comes with a plethora of additional software and we've decided to award additional points for a few of the more compelling ones. First up is Nokia Maps, which allows you to perform local searches and get directions, much like Google Maps. The nice thing about this is that it supports the N82's built in GPS module, although you'll have to dish out about $10 a month to get voice directions the other functionality is free.
We also appreciate Nokia's new system wide search feature. With a plugin right on the home screen this software allows you to simultaneously search your entire handset and the internet for anything you need. Unfortunately the predictive search features still aren't up to scratch. The program uses the built in T9 predictive search for typing things out, but we prefer the ability to simply type something out on the keypad and have the program match all possible permutations. So for example it would be nice if typing 3,6,7 searched for both "dog" and "for". This is a feature that we see on Windows Mobile devices and it makes things a lot easier. We also found it a little limiting that Yahoo was the only search engine available for online searches, we would have liked to see Google support as well. These gripes aside, though, it's still a very useful program.
In addition to Maps and Search we also decided to award points for the Nokia N82's built in file browser, which makes moving your files around very easy and is a feature we expect from any smart phone. We also like Nokia's lifeblogger software, which allows you to easily make posts and even upload media to Typepad blogs. It would be nice to see support for other popular blogging platforms like Bloggr and Wordpress, however.
