N80 One Week Review

this is the N80 just after I open the box. As you can see, yo get a hand full of accessories with your new N80:

• a stereo ear phone with a microphone, you can use it to listen to your local FM radio stations, change the volume and radio station, listen to your MP3, and start/stop/answer phone calls using the voice commands interface
• one adapter that enables you to use your preferred standard stereo ear phone
• one charger
• one charger adapter, that enables you to use the older Nokia chargers
• one USB data cable, to sync, transfer data and music, … with your computer
• one CD with the Nokia PC Synch and Nokia LifeBlog
• one MiniSD card of 512MB

My first impression was that the phone is, let`s say, “sexy”, but just a little too big.
but After I turned it on I just had good surprises …

What I liked about the phone (in no particular order):

• Big screen with a good resolution
• 2 cameras, the main with 3MP, and the second VGA
• The Wi-Fi connection was perfect and very easy with my access point at home
• the ear phones are very good
• the voice recognition for the contacts is perfect, and recognizes the names you write for the contact, there is no need to record a “name” for each contact you want to call using the voice command
• The built-in PIM is just perfect
• the Synchronization app (PC Sync) is perfect, and synchronized even the pictures for the contacts with outlook in our desktop.
• The build-in Web Browser is a lot better than the “Pocket IE” from windows mobile smart phones.
• The Visual Radio app is just great
• The Logs app that ships with the phone is almost perfect, it keeps track of all made and received calls, started data connections (packet and wi-fi), all these with start time, duration, and data traffic for the data connections.

What I did not liked about the phone (in no particular order):

• The “PopPort” connector does not have a button to release the connected device, and it looks a little too fragile.
• The Music Manager from PC Sync is a too hard to use if you have lots of MP3 in your computer.
• It does not comes with any kind of case.
• The build-in alarm clock only allows one alarm to be configured (yes, I have problems waking up every morning).

here are two pictures of the phone:

After this first impression, I started to make the phone useful for me, and not just for my operator.

Connected the data cable to my computer with PC Sync already installed, and tried to Sync the phone with my Outlook to get my contacts and schedule on the phone
, but the Sync does not started in the first try, I had to figure out that I need to go to the phone, set a user and password in the Sync configuration and set the same one in the PC, after the first 5 minutes of rage I liked this feature

After that it was time to test the camera, and the time was perfect, party at night
A few pictures later, the main camera on the phone is great, the only problem is that the “led flash” is not as good as the ones from the Sony cameras, but for daylight pictures it works well. Night pictures get a little dark.

time to go online, configured my access point at home to allow connections from the N80 MAC, and started surfing, the web browser is just great, the only TIP here is remember to configure your browser to ask what connection to use, otherwise your operator may have already configured it to use always its data connection.

Other TIP for your online experience is looking at Shozu , that I talked about in the last post.

Other thing you should care about is the battery life time, is you use your phone just to make phone calls it will last for about a week, but I think no one that spends money with a Series 60 phone will use it just for making phone calls.
if you use a lot the Wi-Fi connection, your battery will last for about 4 or 5 hours.
if you love some music, and use the N80 as a MP3 player (I use it a lot), your battery will last for about 1 and a half day, but it is just if you turn on the Music Player at 8h and turn it off at 20h as I do.
if you use the Radio application, your battery will last for about 4 days.
access to the memory card consumes a lot of battery, but much less than the blue-tooth or the Wi-Fi connections.

There is a built-in app called Director that allows you to create videos from pictures in your phone or card memory, the videos are really great, you should take a look at them.

After you have it all working, one tip is to get an account at Mobical , you can sync your calendar, contacts and notes with their server using SyncML and have all your data online when you need it. Mobical will send all the configuration to your phone using SMS and you will not need to do any think manually.

and the last thing is the built-in e-mail client, that is integrated into the SMS client, and the MMS client …
All this integration is good, because you can receive an e-mail and send it as MMS, or receive a SMS message and forward it to your friend e-mail address, but it is a little bit confusing too, and the e-mail server configuration is a little hard to find, but once you find it, it is just perfect.

After that, if you receive an e-mail with a word or excel attachment, you can read it with the Quick office application suite, directly in your phone.

Talking about the Quick Office, I could not open any of the PowerPoint presentations I testes with it, but all the Word and excel docs worked perfectly.

I`m with this N80 for about a week now, and these are my first impressions, I still have some questions, and if you know the answers I`ll thank you a lot!

Is there any financial application for Symbian? I want to be able to enter in it all the data when I`m away from home, and the principal thing, is that I want to be able to import this data into a desktop application when I`m home.
Is there any Skype client for the N80?
Is there a place to buy a case for my phone?

Thanks for any comments …

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