Nokia N85 review: Nseries revved up

FM radio

The FM radio on Nokia N85 has a neat and simple interface and can automatically scan and save the available stations in your area. It also has RDS support and Visual radio. The latter requires internet connection and WLAN won't do.

There is nothing more to be demanded from the FM radio

With RDS and automatic scanning however you're less likely to resort to network data transfers with Visual Radio. In addition Nokia N85 offers a direct shortcut to the online radio directory where hundreds of stations are available.

There is also a shortcut to the online radio directory

FM transmitter

An interesting feature of the Nokia N85 is the built-in FM transmitter. It allows you to broadcast your favorite tracks over a predefined radio frequency. Those can then be picked up by any device with an FM radio receiver in the vicinity.

The FM transmitter has quite simple interface

The signal strength of the N85 is decent, making it quite usable in a car for example. The FM transmitter application itself has a really nice and simple user interface so the handset has every chance of replacing a CD changer in your car for example.

The image gallery - n-series of extras

The gallery of Nokia N85 looks simply great in 3D rotating view. The speed of photo browsing increases if you press and hold the direction buttons on the D-pad. This allows quick skipping of tons of files if you're not in the habit of cleaning up your memory every now and then. And the photos do look amazing on the OLED display.

The picture gallery of Nokia N85 is simply great

Otherwise, the Nseries gallery brings no changes in terms of features - pictures can be viewed in both portrait and landscape mode and zoomed in up to 8x. The zooming however as we mentioned is a real disaster.

Nokia N85 offers portait and landscape modes for the gallery too • Zooming in takes ages

We have never seen a phone take so long to zoom in on a photo as this one. And you have our word, we have seen some pretty bad cases. At a speed like that, you are highly unlikely to use zoom too often. Panning is okay though.

The gallery offers a nice slide show with customizable effects and delay between slides. You can also choose the direction of the slideshow - forward or backward from the currently selected photo and the track to go with it. Music can also be switched off if you prefer.

The gallery also has a very good picture tagging system. In addition to geotagging, which is automatically handled by the camera, you can add as many tags as you like to each photo and then use them as filters.

File manager can do it all

If the gallery file-management options (which even includes sending multiple files at a time) is insufficient you can use the file manager. It allows you to do almost anything you can think of with your files. Copying, moving, creating new folders - you name it and it's a safe bet that Nokia N85 can do it.

The file manager is our favorite

A new version of the useful "Search" application is also aboard Nokia N85. It has a reserved line in the active standby menu, which is hardly a surprise given how useful it is. The application itself finds almost every item in your handset containing a given keyword. From messages to settings, every bit of data is checked and then all results are displayed on the screen.

The Search application is on of the most useful there is on board