iGadget Life

Well, it lasted just short of two weeks - my Nokia N80 has gone back to Orange!

I had been waiting for the arrival of Nokia’s N80 for some time - and with a couple of months still left on my existing contract - I decided that I could wait no longer and went and ordered myself a Silver N80.

It arrived promptly the next day and in no time I had it up and running.. First impression were good, the handset wasn’t as large as I had been expecting, and was pretty modern looking. The screen quality was the first thing that really makes you say ‘wow’. After a bit of fumbling around I soon had the handset connecting to my home WiFi and surfing the net… It was from then onwards that I slowly started to realise that perhaps this handset wasn’t as good as I was hoping it would be…

After surfing a couple of web pages using the phones very cool web browser, I started to get ‘Out of Memory’ errors.. I got a couple of these and then the handset reset itself.. Hmm that’s not good…

Later in the day I took the dog for a stroll and took my new toy along to see what the camera quality was like for pictures and video.. A few snaps later, the results on the high quality screen seemed to be good.. as was the video.. but again I kept getting ‘Out of memory’ errors when trying to preview the videos I had just taken…. It was not until I transferred the content across to my Mac, that I realised that the quality of some pictures was just not as good as I had hoped.. 50% of them were not quite in focus or were blurry… Those that did come out were really very good though.

Moving on from the camera, I just did not get on very well with other core mobile features. The Messaging system was good, but simple things like the order the first-name, surname was displayed annoyed me… You could change this quite easily under Contacts, and the change was reflected in the messaging system, when sending a text, but when you received a message, it would say that it was from surname, first-name… only a small issue, but showed that the device wasn’t as ’smart’ as you were lead to believe…

I was in two minds about the operating system - S60 3rd Edition - On one hand, I didn’t like it because it was a little quirky, on the other I loved it because of the expandability and the amount of potential it had. The former was probably because I wasn’t used to the interface. Things like writing an SMS did drive me completely mad - and I wanted to hurl the handset out of the window on numerous occasions!! For instance, you click Messaging (the left soft key) and the screen would blank momentarily, then load the Messaging application, this would then disappear, and the Create SMS window would appear.. It felt very ‘macro’ like where you click and it replays recorded actions…

Writing a text was not a very enjoyable experience… The keypad does not have your traditional button’s to depress when typing, it was more flattened .. I didn’t find it very easy to quickly type out a message.. and because of this I found that I made quite a few mistakes… Using the joy-pad in the middle to navigate back to a word to re-spell was not a problem, but I found that when I wanted to move back to the end of a sentence (right arrow) I would keep hitting the right ’soft key’ which is set to ‘close’ or ‘exit’… with no warning of ‘are you sure you want to quit?’ the text editing window just closes… I did this so many times even when trying to be extra careful.. I don’t even have big fingers and am pretty nimble with a keypad, so can only imagine how frustrating it would be for those fatter fingered folks..

Battery life on the N80 appears to start off quite well, running on full capacity for ages, but when its starts to drop, it drops pretty fast! I used the handset quite heavily over the week-and-a-bit that I had it - using the camera and WiFi… I did find that it was pretty much exhausted by the end of the day… I can understand that there is a lot going on within the handset and that WiFi is a killer, but I do think that the battery could have been substantially larger in capacity and should really have come with a car charger - after all the handset is aimed for the business user…

I have to say that I was somewhat disappointed with the N80, I guess that I hadn’t realised what a difference it would make to have a handset without auto-focus… Being an avid photographer using my k750i I found that the picture quality really was inferior on the N80, to me it would have been a step-backwards..

The ‘Out of Memory’ issues I know are resolved in a firmware update, but the battery-life, camera quality, the far to easy to quit applications, and not very comfortable keypad made me decide that the N80 in-fact wasn’t the phone for me..

Don’t get me wrong the N80 is a very powerful mobile or ‘portable computer’ as Nokia like to call them. It is very feature-packed, I especially liked Nokia’s Life Blog - shame that it only runs on Windows though.. It will be a brilliant handset for most people - after they have run the firmware update - but for me it just didn’t cut it…

I am currently keeping my eye on up-and-coming handsets, the K800i for its camera, but I have to say that probably wont satisfy my needs, as I love smartphone functionality, so I think it will be one of two new Nokia N-Series handsets, the N73 - with 3.2mp camera with auto-focus or the slightly chunkier N93, also with an auto-focus 3.2mp camera that can record DVD quality video. This beauty also has Wifi, and a 3D graphics chip for gaming….

I think its gonna be a tough choice, but thus far the N93 seems to tick all the right boxes for me….. I cant wait till these exciting new handsets start coming out…

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