Nokia N80 review: Jack of all trades

Video

The secondary VGA camera works in vertical mode because it is supposed to be used for video calls and thus is in “portrait” orientation. Nokia N80 records video in the high 352 x 288 pixels resolution (CIF). The phone can record audio during video recording and allows the users to zoom while recording. It uses the free memory and thus has no limit of the video records. It also has various settings to utilize the video application to suit the user’s taste perfectly.

Video view finder • video settings

Nokia N80 video samples

Wi-Fi browsing makes a difference

The phone supports GPRS, EDGE, Wi-Fi, UMTS, PTT, Bluetooth and IrDa. Nokia N80 works with Bluetooth Specification 1.2 supporting the following profiles: Basic Printing Profile, Generic Access Profile, Serial Port Profile, Dial-up Networking Profile, Headset Profile, Handsfree Profile, Generic Object Exchange Profile, Object Push Profile, File Transfer Profile, Basic Imaging Profile, SIM Access profile, and Human Interface Device Profile. Unfortunately, the A2DP profile is not among them which makes impossible the use of stereo Bluetooth headset with the phone.

USB 2.0 is also supported with the assistance of a USB cable. When connected to a PC, one of three modes can be chosen for the handset: “Mass storage” - memory card is available as a removable USB drive, no drivers are required; “PC Suite” - standard mode; “Picture Bridge” - direct access to printer, which supports PictBridge. The fast data transfer can be used via GPRS, EDGE or 3G UMTS. You can also try the Wi-Fi connectivity, in which case you have to be near a Wi-Fi hotspot.

You can set the phone to detect and connect automatically to such hotspots or you can search them manually. When you are connected, N80 creates an access point for the hotspot and starts using its Internet broadband. The connection speed depends on the distance from the hotspot and on the provider. The signal is displayed as the network signal strength.

Further on the phone is the first UPnP (Universal Plug & Play) enabled handset on the market. The UPnP technology is the wireless alternative to the well known Plug & Play standard that allows seamless connection between different devices. In the future the UPnP enabled devices which have some sort of wireless connectivity options such as Wi-Fi or Bluetooth could easily communicate with other intelligent devices without the need for drivers or user configuration. Thus in several years you could be commanding you entire set of home appliances with the help of your smartphone or PDA only - and what’s more – you could do that from your office.

Available WLAN • hotspot details

Just like on PC

Browsing with Nokia N80 is a sheer delight. There are two separate web browser applications. One of them is much simpler and reminds us of the browser implemented in older models. The new one is entirely a different story. It makes even very sophisticated pages fit on the screen and displays web pages just as on PC. There is no doubt that the great display helps a lot for this.

Old web browser

There is even a mouse cursor which can be operated through the four-way navigation button. Surprisingly, it works great and is very easy to control. A semi-transparent mini-map of the page displays on the screen when scrolling a webpage. The mini-map can also be accessed by a shortcut – the “8” key. You can zoom in and out on the page using the “*” and “#” buttons. It’s amazing to see how small the text can be and still remain readable. In fact, this browser fits more information in a single screen than the IE browser on the VGA display of Qtek 9000!

Most of the sites we visited (including gsmarena.com, take a look at the screenshots) looked exactly like on the PC. Even when loading complex pages, the web browser was operating fast and there was no slowdown in the scrolling speed. The browser also loads Flash clips (not all of them, pitifully) and has no problems dealing with Java Scripts. All-in-all, it’s an impressive job from Nokia.

The web browser is impressive