Maxwell A. Arnold's Blog: Nokia N80 Review

Nokia N80
I came home one day to see this phone in its box sitting in my room with a note that said “Max... Please try this out”. An all too familiar situation for me. Open up the packaging, find the phone and the battery, take apart my current phone, switch the SIM card, place SIM card in new phone, place in battery, replace cover, throw European power adapter over my shoulder in knowledge of the fact that I have a perfectly competent Nokia charger as well, plug in, turn on, charge, configure, examine. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Other than the N70, this is the first phone I've tried that has a second lens to it. I must say, though, this is the worst idea ever. I tried taking a few pictures of myself with it... first of all it doesn't even have flash, and I'm stuck in a shadier location at the time, so I come up with silhouettes of me, rather than what I would expect from the regular lens; Quality Photographs. The second lens is 0.3 Megapixels, whereas the main one has 3 megapixels, as well as flash and a distance toggle (the switch where one side is a mountain and one side is a flower... I don't know the proper term for that) all put together so that the phone is held sideways by default, with a button on top so it feels even more like a regular camera (that 16:9 view always helps for taking better photos!). I found the button a bit of a pain, though. Although it has the benefit of being able to hold it down from anywhere in the phone to turn on the camera, this can work to your disadvantage, especially if you talk with your right hand. If you're talking on the phone and just repositioning or have too tight of a grip, you can accidentally hold down the camera button, and hold it down long enough, and you will hear a nice, obnoxious shutter sound followed by a big booming flash in the palm of your hand while talking on the phone, so now, once you get off you get a picture looking something like this:

However, this brings up a good point with the phone's operating system. It can multitask on voice calls. So if you need to check a text message for what someone said while you are talking to someone who wants to know, you can do it without hanging up (a relief for those who use per-minute billing carriers, who get 4 seconds into a call realizing they may need to hang up for that very reason). You can even play a game like the included Snake and Card deck while on a call, so suppose you are on hold waiting for a customer service representative during bottleneck hour, or your Mother-in-law decides to call again, at least you have something to do while you say “uh-huh” and “interesting! I'm sure glad i have you to inform me about this!” into the mic every five seconds while feeding the snake and looking for that final ace to win the game.

Like all phones in the N-Series, it takes a long time to boot up. Thirty seconds! My Nokia 6103 can start up and shut down twice in that time! But good things do come to those who wait, remember... The battery life, I must say is pretty decent. I use this phone as a “weekend phone” because I do not wish to be taking this phone to school, as I would be jumped in a minute (or two start-up/shut downs for this phone... however you want to translate that into time), and I can last an entire weekend on one charge with it being on from about 5:00 PM Friday to about 6:30 AM Monday. The call quality was “meh” on this one. MUCH better than the N93's (read my rant about that one! Jon's soon to come...), it's just that there are two excruciatingly bad negatives. One is that there is only one small hole for the audio to come out. So small that I could barely get 2mm past the tip of a push pin through it. And two is that there is a bit of a metallic transition around the earpiece, and they weren't welded or soldered together in the manufacturing plant, so there is a bit of a gap there, that is vertically uneven, and during phone calls can get a good grip on the hairs on your ears, and sometimes the skin too, and then when you pull it away, you feel a sharp pain up on your listening ear. YEOWTCH! One more thing I dislike about the operating system, is that every time you slide the flap closed, it will ALWAYS prompt you whether or not you want to lock the keypad. This REALLY annoys me in the sense that I am constantly opening or closing the flap and must constantly choose “no” or “yes” if I'm putting it back in my pocket. A couple more miscellaneous items, the pencil key I find handy because that changes the writing mode (regular, capital, numbers, predictive), as well as the Clear key to act as backspace, which saves having to do a button sequence to go back, and finally, a Mini SD card slot, which makes file transfers a lot easier.

Wired: Bluetooth, Infrared and WiFi make this a versatile wireless communications tool. Camera feature emphasized – maybe a little too much. Two lenses – yet flash on only one. Battery life good. Big, bright display. Has option to connect wireless keyboard via bluetooth for marathon typists on their cell phones, and have never heard the word “Palm Pilot”. Mini SD card slot allows you to expand memory to as much as you want.

Tired: “Meh” voice quality, casing around earpiece catches on to ear skin and hair easily. Secondary lens very low quality, camera button badly positioned, intolerable start-up time, closing the flap brings up annoying prompt every time.

Bottom line: Make the casing all out of one material, so we can spare our ears, make the earpiece bigger, improve it or lose it with the second lens (i.e. Get flash), use the middle button on the navigation pad to take pictures, i mean, that's how it works on most other phones, doesn't it? Speed up the boot-up time, and find a more convenient way to place the keypad, or just don't use the stupid prompt for whether or not to lock it.

Overall rating:3/5 - 60%

Oh yeah, here are some photographs from the main camera... the flash IS a little light-drenching but what can you do?