Nokia N81 preview: Hands on N-Gage

Touching your way around

The Navi wheel is probably the feature that brings the highest wow-factor with the Nokia N81. The thing is that the navigation D-pad allows touch sensitive input - by flowing your thumb along the lines of the silvery square you can scroll through the Gallery or the customizable Multimedia menu. It's incredibly pleasant to work with the Navi wheel and the onscreen performance usually matches the speed of your thumb, which makes things feel really natural. It even makes you wonder how come it's only now that we see such a solution for the first time from any mobile manufacturer. As an N-series offspring pictures, music and video is in the center of the Nokia N81. The user interface is rather zippy and we liked how it handled pictures in the Gallery - zooming, panning, and scrolling is really fast.

Using the Gallery with the Navi wheel and zooming with the gaming keys above the display

The Navi key is active in the music player too

Gaming platform

The Nokia N81 is the first device armed with the new N-Gage platform and it has plenty of storage to make use of it. The dedicated gaming keys can be spotted (eventually) at the top of the front panel. There are three games that come preinstalled with the Nokia N81 - the FIFA 2007, Asphalt 3: Street Rules, and Space Impact Light. Obviously, we have more to see of those games as a couple of them are even not officially published yet.

Space Impact Light on Nokia N81

FIFA 2007 on Nokia N81

It seems we are up to a lot of fun for this weekend and we will leave you to enjoy our first look at the Nokia N81. We will be bringing down the full exclusive GSMArena review of the Nokia N81 as soon as we can.

This Nokia N81 8GB preview comes to you thanks to importgsm.com.