Nokia N82 Review

Key features

• 5 megapixel camera with auto focus and Carl Zeiss optics
• Xenon flash and active lens cover
• 2.4" 16M color QVGA display
• 128 MB RAM
• Wi-Fi with UPnP
• Built-in GPS receiver and A-GPS functionality
• Nokia maps application covering over 100 countries worldwide
• Convenient standard 3.5 mm audio jack on the top
• 3G (with HSDPA), EDGE and GPRS support
• Symbian OS 9.2 Series 60 3rd edition Feature Pack 1 UI
• TV-out functionality
• Automatic UI rotation
• Stereo speakers
• Large capacity battery

Main disadvantages

• Controversial design and questionable ergonomics
• No RDS for the FM radio
• Below average GPS performance
• Extra charges apply for voice assisted navigation
• No office documents editing application
• Doesn't charge off USB

The Nokia N73 is one of the best handsets ever released in the NSeries range, and has been my main phone since it first hit the market. I've tried over phones, other Nokia handsets, other NSeries, handsets from and handsets from Most recently I purchased an N95, but even that went in favour of my N73, back in July. The N73 just gives a good solid all round package. It is reliable, dependable, has a very good quality camera, is well built, solid, and hard working. It is simple and straight forward to use, and has a battery that just goes on and on. I know when I leave home for the day I can listen to music on the phone, do some web browsing whilst I'm out and about, view some email, make some calls, send text, just the ordinary things you do on a daily basis with a modern mobile phone these days and the battery won't run down. I've never been caught out without power on my N73, unlike past handsets, like the N80 and N95. My N73 has served me well, and it would take something very good to tempt me away. And something especially has arrived.

we were able to see the virtual launch from inside Nokia house. A once in a lifetime experience, not only did we lucky few get to be inside Nokia house whilst the launch happened, we also got to question the N82 product manager and get our hands on the handset there and then to put it to the test. When you have a bunch of guys together, who know their phones, and are big fans of Nokia and NSeries products, you need to be confident your product is going to be good enough. With all due respect to our hosts and all, if the N82 failed to hit the mark, we would have let them know, how and why. As it turned out the N82 team have a handset they can be proud of, and all of us found it hard to let go of our phones for the rest of the day. Straight away we were installing apps, taking pictures, making calls, browsing the net, testing the features, giving the handset a real going over. The overall impression of the phone was very good, and you could see the delight we all had when our hosts kindly allowed us to take the handset away with us to really put the N82 to the test, in every day usage.

To get straight to the point, the Nokia N82 is a damn fine phone. Very often with a new phone you will find little niggles, something that doesn't work as well as you would expect, or something missing that would have seemed a logical inclusion. It's still early days, but so far the N82 is proving to be a reliable top notch handset. The design is good. The phone feels well built, has a solid feel and is well balanced, with good weight distribution. One of the most important parts of a mobile phone is the keypad. Without a decent keypad, a phone fails. The keypad on the N82 is different, very reminiscent of the W880i from Sony Ericsson, but as the keys are not as cramped as they are on a W880i they are much more user friendly. Sending a text message on the N82 is simple and straight forward, and the keypad is an improvement over the cramped layout found on the N73.

Down the right hand side of the phone you find near the top the micro USB port, in the middle the Micro SD slot and near the bottom the charging port. The N82 doesn't charge via the USB cable. All you find on the bottom of the phone is the microphone. Then, going up the left hand side of theh andset, at top and bottom are the speakers, in between which there is the camera shutter key, gallery shortcut key and volume keys, which double up as zoom keys when in camera mode. The Nokia N82 has a 3.5mm jack point, which you can use with your own headphones for music listening. In a smart move, Nokia have placed this on the top of the phone, so when the phone is in your pocket the headphone lead sits naturally on top. The lanyard slot is on the top right hand corner of the phone, right next to the 3.5mmm slot.

The N82 is designed for 'technology stylists', people who like their phone to look good but don't want to lose out on features. The main focus of the phone is the excellent 5.0 megapixel camera. The camera is equipped with autofocus, a Xenon flash and a Carl Zeiss lens. The lens is covered by a protective cover, which when flicked open automatically activates the camera. The response time is very fast, in no time the camera is active and ready for use. There are various camera options in the settings menu, for changing scene mode, adjusting colour options, white balance, etc. When a picture is taken it stores very quickly. Press the capture button again after taking a pic and almost instantly the N82 is ready for the next shot. The speed is very impressive. The N82 has a large, TFT, QVGA screen supporting up to 16 million colours. As a viewfinder for the camera the whole screen is used and the clarity is superb. Browsing around phone forums and other blogs in the last day I've seen some people complain about the small size of the screen. Personally I think it is more than adequate, and a bigger screen would also mean a bigger phone. That would have upset the balance of the handset.

The N82 is very fast, considerally quicker than any S60 phone I have used to date. From boot up, the N82 accesses straight into the menu without any noticeable delay. Anyone who has used a S60 phone will know that this is not usually the case. Menu navigation is quick and snappy, and the D-Pad is easy to use. I've installed quite a few apps and I will talk about that in a separate post.

The alphanumeric keypad of Nokia N82 is surely its most controversial component. The tons of negative feedback the Nokia N91 received for its similar layout does make one wonder why Nokia decided to have another go at it in such a landmark product as the N82.

The ergonomics of the keypad are not as bad as in Nokia N91 mainly because this time it's level with the screen and each row is easy to reach. By no means would we call it good either. The keys are far too small and difficult to distinguish and, generally, typing without looking down is almost impossible. However, because of the ample spacing between keys we are giving it an average score. We still believe Nokia could have done a better job, especially with this particular phone.

The backlighting is even enough and, although not the strongest around, it does a decent job.

The backlighting is even enough but not the strongest of all

Display

Nokia N82 is equipped with a 2.4" TFT LCD display of QVGA resolution. It is capable of showing up to 16 million colors but its quality did not particularly impress us. It does lack some brightness and the colors are a bit washed out compared to Nokia N95 8GB. Otherwise, in bright sunlight it is just as good as any other recent Nokia - the display remains perfectly visible and choosing the right angle to work with it is not in question at all.

Nokia N82's display

Telephony

With N82 signal reception is just what you would expect in a high-end Nokia phone - simply flawless. The vibration is also strong enough to make sure you never miss an incoming call or message. The phone offers brilliant speaker quality and the sound during calls is very clear and without any interferences.

Calling Dexter on Nokia N82

As far as ringing volume is concerned however, the situation is somewhat different. It is by far not the loudest phone around beating only the Apple iPhone among all 33 phones we have tested so far. In all honesty, Nokia N82 seemed to perform a bit better on some extremely high-pitched ringtones but these are hardly ever used anyway. Here is how Nokia N82 ranks among some other tested phones in our loudspeaker test. You can find more info on the actual testing process along with more results here.

Speakerphone test	Voice, dB	Pink noise/ Music, dB	Ringing phone, dB	Overal score
Nokia N82	70.2	61.2	65.3	Below average
Apple iPhone (firmware 1.1.1)	67.2	60.2	66.6	Below average
Nokia N95 8GB	75.7	66.2	70.5	Good
Samsung G800	70.7	66.6	73.6	Good
Sony Ericsson K850	71.0	75.7	75.7	Very good

Pure Smart

Nokia N82 runs on Symbian 9.2 OS with the Series60 3rd Edition user interface. The added Feature Pack 1 is no news for Nokia smartphones any more but still deserves mentioning.

Nokia N82 runs on the Symbian 9.2 OS with S60 UI (Feature pack 1 included)

The 128MB of RAM is also an important factor to OS performance. In reality, 128MB is virtually impossible to deplete no matter how hard you try. Unless you do it intentionally, Memory Full warnings are not something you can expect on the Nokia N82 screen.

The phone's main menu has only two different view modes. They are both well known: a 4 x 3 grid of icons and a list. In addition, you can choose whether you prefer your icons animated or not. For some reason the V-shape and Horseshoe views are not available with the recent Nokia handsets we get to test. Font sizes are also configurable depending on your preferences.

Different menu views

Navigating the menus is fast with instant response to key presses and no delays. Most screens of the user interface can be displayed in both portrait and landscape mode depending on the user preference. The screen automatically rotates when the phone is turned to the left. However, it sometimes won't rotate straight away and needs a gentle shake before switching between view modes. The screen rotation is as fast as in Nokia N95 8GB - that is almost instant. Nokia hasn't included any animation for the screen rotation - as seen in Apple iPhone - the screen just goes black for a second and pops back up in the desired mode.

The blue circle next to the icon of a running application is a well known Symbian indication reminding users to quit unwanted applications that are still running in the background. Luckily, the days when there was only a single alarm slot and the voice recorder was limited to a miserly minute are now long gone.

Multiple alarms can be activated on Nokia N82, each with its own repetition interval and due day

The active stand-by display is naturally also present with Nokia N82. This is a nice and convenient way to bring shortcuts to all favorite applications to your home screen. You can even assign shortcuts to websites of your choice for quicker access. The two soft keys functions can also vary. As the standard keypad lock pattern is a quick successive pressing of the left selection key and the asterisk , when the left kay is pressed in a normal day-to-day usage it will wait for about a second before acting as assigned to see if a lock command is to follow.

Active stand-by display on Nokia N82 holds a huge number of shortcuts

Otherwise, the automatic key lock is activated after a pre-defined period. The options are from 5 seconds to an hour and you can switch this feature off if you see fit.

The built-in memory is 132MB, which is a respectable figure by all means. The included 2GB microSD memory card comes in very handy for extending it but you can go for an even higher capacity card as user reports suggest. Accessing applications or any other files from the memory card is quick and you probably won't notice any difference compared to accessing ones from the phone memory.

The multimedia menu is among Nokia N82's highlights as seems to be the case with all other recent Nseries models. It is launched by pressing the dedicated key and provides quick access to the multimedia features of the handset. It is identical to the ones found on Nokia N81 and Nokia N95 8GB, with icons sorted thematically. They appear as drop-down menus when the respective tab is selected. If you find the menu layout unsuitable, you can freely rearrange icons until you're pleased with the result.

The multimedia menu tabs can be freely reordered according to the user's needs

As with any Symbian phone, there is a built-in voice recognition system. It is doing an amazing job, being fully speaker-independent and recognizing a remarkably high percentage of the user commands. Its performance can be matched only by Nokia N95 and N95 8GB.

Music player

The music player is another good Nokia N82 application. There are no dedicated music keys but controlling it with the D-pad is just as easy and you won't miss them much. A huge number of audio formats including MP3, AAC, eAAC+ and WMA, are supported. The M3U playlists are also managed flawlessly and files are added to the music library by simply choosing the refresh option.

Sorting your songs by artist, album, genre and composer is automatic and searching tracks by gradual typing is also available. Transferring tracks to Nokia N82 can be achieved via Bluetooth, USB or by simply downloading them from the internet. You can also use a card reader for that purpose and transfer them directly to your memory card.

Upon completing a USB transfer, the phone automatically prompts scanning for new music tracks and, if allowed to do so, adds the new ones to the music library.

The music player offers various track sorting and some different visualizations

The player comes with five equalizer presets, which is a good count by any means. If it still seems insufficient, you can edit them or create new ones in a matter of seconds.

The available equalizer presets o creating a new one is quick and easy

In contrast to Nokia N81 for example, the music player of Nokia N82 can be switched off when it is not needed. This can save some RAM but with this amount of available operating memory this is not that important.

Being one of Nokia's best equipped phones Nokia N82 naturally also includes support for the A2DP Bluetooth profile, which allows listening to your music on a Bluetooth stereo headset. We had no problem connecting any of the tested headphones.

Finding your way around

Like the Nokia N95 versions, the N82 has a built-in GPS receiver. Having tested all of them we are safe to conclude that their performance is virtually the same. Unluckily, the problem with the slow initial satellite lock still exists with Nokia N82. The phone needs quite some time to find you initial position, especially if you start it when you are in a moving vehicle.

The built-in A-GPS somewhat reduces the time needed for that purpose but at the cost of (in most cases) pricy data transfer.

The built-in GPS receiver works with the Nokia Maps application, which is one of the software applications to offer the most detailed maps. Furthermore, it is free and relatively easy to use. Well, at least the basic information is free, because charges apply to the voice guidance and turn-by-turn navigation. You only get a three-day trial that goes with the new version of the Nokia Maps application, so you can see if the voice navigation is worth the extra dime.

In other words, if you want to make use of the built-in receiver you;ll be better off relying on Nokia maps as not all other third-party applications can detect and work with the integrated GPS receiver.

Nokia Maps has nearly the most detailed road maps among all navigation solutions

So, leaving this aside, we have to admit that the Nokia Maps application itself is not bad at all and has very decent looks. Furthermore, its route planning algorithm can be easily customized to the user preferences. Toll roads and motorways can be avoided and so can tunnels and ferries. The route selection can be set to either fastest or shortest. The app is also usable for pedestrian navigation or you can switch the GPS receiver off to use instead of your paper map.

The overall impression of using the Nokia N82 as a GPS navigation system is positive, except for the flaws already pointed out. Still, if you don't have the highest expectations, you might find the Nokia N82 GPS perfectly adequate.

Final words

Nokia N82 is the kind of gadget to make high hopes inescapable and it is important to know whether it lives up to the responsible job of being the N73 successor. And here it is: in our view, it carries the burden lightly. N82 has all the premises to become a true bestseller, combining full smartphone functionality with the best camera on the mobile phone market. Upgrading from Nokia N73 seems the definitive choice, if not the only option.