Nokia N80 review: Jack of all trades

Smart organizer

The phone has various organizer applications and features. It features a dual clock. You can set two different times and dates in two time zones. The Calendar has Month, Week and Day view. You can assign Meeting, Anniversary, Memo and To-do tasks in the Calendar. You can also put alarms on those assignments.

Calendar month • day • and week view

There is also an Office icon in the main menu and it leads to a folder with Notes, Converter, Calculator, Recorder and Quickoffice. The Converter converts Currencies, Area, Energy, Length, Mass, Power, Pressure, Temperature, Time, Velocity and Volume. The calculator is very simple and easy to use. Regrettably, the Recorder has a one minute limit for voice records. This seems quite illogical since the phone has such powerful features, enough internal memory and a memory card slot.

Calculator • Recorder

The Quickoffice opens various office files. Word and Excel files are supported, of course. They can be viewed seamlessly. Zooming, Scrolling, Resizing are supported as well. Regrettably, you cannot modify them in any way. There is also a Data Transfer application in the Tools submenu. It is used to transfer contacts and organizer items from one Nokia phone to another.

Word file • Excel file

Software issues

There are several applications preinstalled in the phone: an IM application for chat with other users; Kodak application for sharing and sending pictures on the Internet. There is also an application for connecting a wireless keyboard to the phone.

My Own submenu

One of the main issues of Nokia N80 is that the new Symbian 9.1 operating system is not compatible with applications written for older versions. Thus you would have difficulties finding additional software for this phone. We could only hope that by the end of the summer new 3rd party applications would begin to gradually emerge on the market.

3D Snake labyrinth

N80 has two preinstalled games: Snakes and Card Deck. “Snakes” is a 3D version of the popular Snake game of the Nokia phones. It is quite hard but interesting and we found it very amusing. Card Deck is a package of several card games like Klondike, Golf, etc...Of course, you can install additional games, in case you find any, though.

All-in-one tool

Our opinion is that Nokia N80 is a brilliant business phone with powerful equipment and many great features. Probably many would not share our enthusiasm and will say that it’s too big or uncomfortable to use but we consider these drawbacks as minor. Now the heavy price of the phone will be the main disadvantage that will dishearten many potential customers. Considering the fact that this phone offers 3G support, Wi-Fi Internet connectivity, a 3 megapixel camera and the advanced Symbian 9.1 OS we don’t find it strange at all that there are many people willing to pay even the hefty introductory price.