Nokia N86 8MP review: Lens wide open

Connecting people

Connectivity is surely one of the elements of the Nokia Nseries models and the N86 8MP is hardly an exception to the rule. In fact the phone supports all contemporary data transfer means.

USB 2.0 and Bluetooth 2.0 are a nice start of the lengthy list. All kinds of network connectivity are also on board - from ageing GPRS, through EDGE to 3G with HSDPA - the N86 8MP has it all covered. The HSDPA is limited to 3.6Mbps and there is no HSUPA which for a high-end device like this is a pity.

By the way if you are interested where you can find UMTS 2100MHz or you are not sure whether it's supported in your country, you should definitely check out our Worldwide Network Bands distribution database.

To complete the wireless communication tally, Wi-Fi with UPnP support is also at hand. Unfortunately, the nice WLAN scanner plug-in present on all recent Nokia S60 smartphones in

Finally, the Nokia N86 8MP has a memory card slot, which can at times provide the fastest data transfer rates. And with an 8GB card in the retail package all you need is a card reader.

Web browser as good as always

Nokia N86 8MP comes complete with an elaborate browser to make use of the great connectivity set. The browser has excellent page rendering and works in both portrait and landscape mode. The zoom level is easily controlled and the font size can be modified to fit as much content as possible on a single page.

The web browser has a great page rendering algorithm

The virtual mouse cursor earns the browser another point. It is easy to control and generally works great. A mini-map can be activated to help finding your way around large sites where lots of scrolling is required.

While the optical joystick in Samsung i7110 and i8510 INNOV8 is the highest we have seen a Symbian browser go, the Nokia N86 8MP isn't too far from that standard.

Organizer and apps are well known

Smartphones can hardly be accused of lacking time-management skills. Even if you do happen to miss an application you need on your Nokia N86 8MP - there is plenty of third party software out there. However for most everyday use you will hardly need anything more than the package you get straight out of the box.

The calendar has the typical three different view modes - monthly, weekly and daily, and four types of events available for setting up - Meeting, Memo, Anniversary and To-do. Each event has unique fields of its own, and some of them allow an alarm to be activated at a preset time to act as a reminder.

The calendar has three view modes and four events available for setting up

Mobile office is also very well geared, with preinstalled applications able to open Word and Excel, PDF and PowerPoint files seamlessly. Unluckily, editing documents is not supported by the included Quickoffice version - but that holds true for every other Nseries handset out there. If you would like editing enabled you will have to get the complete application from the Nokia Download center for a fee.

The mobile office is more than decently geared but it doesn't support editing out of the box

The other office application is ZIP manager, which allows extracting archived files straight on your phone.

Some of the other included organizing and time-management applications are a great unit converter, calculator and voice recorder, as well as the Notes application.

Unit converter, calculator and a voice recorder also come preinstalled

The alarm application allows you to set up as many alarms as you want, each with its own name, trigger day and repeat pattern. If this seems too complicated, there is a quick alarm setup where all you do is set the time and you're good to go.

The alarm application

The Nokia N86 8MP is equipped with a text-to-speech engine that can read phone content such as incoming messages or emails to you out loud. The text-to-speech options include different types of voices and languages.

The text-to-speech settings

Ovi here, Ovi there

Typically for the latest Nokia devices the N86 8MP has tight Ovi integration. You may share with your friends all type of media via Ovi Share and see all the stuff your buddies have published.

Ovi Share, viewing your contact's media, uploading file

The Ovi Contacts did not come preinstalled on our unit despite the fact that it was advertized by Nokia. Anyways, it's free to download and so we did.

After the successful installation Ovi contacts appeared a new tab in the Contacts list. Thanks to this service you will be able to chat in real time with all your Ovi/Google Talk-connected contacts, change your status messages and mood, and all that kind of social networking stuff. In addition you can even share your GPS location so your friends can view immediately where you are at that particular moment using the Ovi Maps. Or you can share the name and the artist of the track you are currently listening to. What can we say more - it all works exactly as advertized. Your contacts need not have an Ovi-connected phone, they can chat with you just fine over Google Talk.

Ovi contacts