Nokia N80 - Mp3-Ringtones-Mobile

4.4 out of 5Average user rating :

NokiaManufacturer :

January, 2007Date :

-Price :

4500Hits :

5User opinions :

N80, one of the latest Nokia handsets, hit the market not long ago and surely it made some big waves along the way. The phone comes in a place of very high class business phones with bunch of features and extras. It features a very good 3 megapixel camera , a hi-resolution display, a miniSD card slot, a FM radio and all this is backed up by advanced connectivity technologies such as quad-band GSM, 3G UMTS, EDGE, and Wi-Fi. The Symbian 9.1 OS with the 3rd Series 60 User Interface is responsible of keeping the phone as smart as possible, while the slider form factor really adds class to the business nature of Nokia N80. There are only several problems that could use a fix. But all in all, the phone packs a good deal of horsepower under its bonnet.

Key features:

Brilliant display
Symbian OS
Incredible web browser
miniSD card slot (128MB miniSD card included in the package)
Very good 3 megapixel camera with flash
Excellent audio quality
FM radio
40 MB internal memory
All connectivity options - Wi-Fi, Bluetooth , IR, USB
UMTS and EDGE support

Main disadvantages:

Rather big dimensions
Top row of the numeric keypad is hardly reachable
No compatibility between Symbian 3rd Generation and lower versions
FM radio lacks RDS
No automatic keypad lock when slid in
Camera lens is not protected

The phone is supposed to be delivered in a package along with a Nokia stereo headset, a Nokia USB cable , a wrist strap, a 128 MB miniSD memory card and a Nokia 3.5 mm audio jack adapter for using regular headphones with the phone. All this is market dependent of course, so you shouldn't count on that information.

Silver brick

Nokia N80 is a big phone. It is thick and wide. The 95 x 50 x 26 mm and 134 g weight can really spoil the first impressions of the phone. And they are of a really classy and elegant business phone. The phone is sold in two colors - smooth stainless and pearl black. The one we got to test was the stainless steel one. The silver top and the metal plate, surrounding the display, the secondary camera and the buttons are designed in a very nice fashion.

The rest of the phone is made out of black plastic, except for the numeric keypad which has a white frame, surrounding the buttons. The shiny silver four-way button on the top part makes an impression of being all metal but in reality it is plastic.

The good thing about the otherwise big phone is that it can be easily operated when held in one hand. That's both opened and closed. As a whole, the phone looks and feels very stylish and elegant.

Useless spring

The sliding mechanism of Nokia N80 works very smoothly and without any problems but the assisting spring doesn't seem to have anything to do with the opening and closing process. Another odd thing is that there is no surface to put your thumb on while you're sliding the phone out or sliding it in. The easiest way is to push the bottom of the top part when you open it and to push down the top part when you close it.

Except for the misunderstanding in the sliding mechanism, the phone is perfectly solid and stable. It did not produce a single creak sound, nor did its construction play in any way. The arresting mechanism between the two parts works very well too.

The front part of the phone is made of silver plastic with a metal plate on it. The plastic accommodates the N80 sign and a tiny LED. The rest of the stuff is located on the metal plate. In the top right corner there is the secondary camera for video calls. It is bulging out of the metal plate a bit.

On the left of it is situated the main speaker, a NOKIA embedded sign and the display below it. Below the display are the two soft keys, the red & green receiver buttons and the four-way button between them. Under them there is another row of buttons, containing the Pencil, the Menu, the Multimedia and the correction “C” buttons.

The back of the phone is elaborated of nice black matt plastic. In the upper part you will find a NOKIA embedded sign. The camera lens' circle is located below it with the flash LED and the macro/landscape switch. The battery cover is under the camera circle and the loosing button is located at the bottom of it.

The battery cover can be opened without any effort using the button on its bottom. Beneath it is the 820 mAh Li-Ion battery. Because of the smaller capacity of the battery used, we've heard numerous concerns about the battery life of N80, but regrettably we couldn't verify them since we used the phone heavily during our tests and thus the battery life we experienced was not indicative for the real-life performance of the phone.

Under the battery is located the SIM card bed. It uses a sliding mechanism to arrest the SIM card in one place. Of course, removing the SIM card itself is not a problem.

The miniSD card slot is to be found on the left side of the body and its cover is very safe and is not likely to be opened by mistake. However, one can find certain difficulties closing it back on as it doesn't fit perfectly when you try to close it. After some time you will get used to the trick of closing it seamlessly. The phone offers hot swap functionality but when the card is pulled out during normal operation of the phone, all applications are closed at once.

The right side of the body features the loudspeaker on its upper part and the camera release button located a bit lower from the middle.

The top of the phone has the traditional Nokia Turn Off/Profiles button on the black back part of phone. On the silver/front part is located the Infrared receiver. The bottom of the phone has a Nokia connector for charger, headset or custom USB cable. It also has a neck-string eyelet.

The unreachable

The keypad of N80 is divided in two parts: the buttons on the top part of the slider are all silvery as part of the color scheme. They are easy to use and distinguish, except for the Menu and Multimedia buttons which are located on a mutual plate and can be mistaken. The four-way navigation button is comfortable to use and the confirmation key works seamlessly.

The numeric keypad, however, is another story. The main problem here is the top row of keys, containing the “1”, “2” and “3” buttons. It is hardly reachable as the user's finger will find the sliding construction in their way when trying to press one of them. May be women will have less difficulties to reach them with their nails but since the phone is more of the masculine type, that still remains an issue. Otherwise, the keypad works fine and the buttons are easy to distinguish when writing. The backlighting is also a good one as it glows in deep blue and illuminates all the buttons evenly.

Hi-res brilliance

Nokia N80 is equipped with a brilliant TFT display capable of displaying 256K colors. The resolution of this remarkable unit is 352 x 426 pixels. Its quite big dimensions of 35 x 41 mm make the use of the phone a very pleasant experience. The picture is very vivid and sharp. Visibility under direct sunlight is not a problem also. It remains visible even under direct sunlight. The backlighting of the display is great, too. Nokia has even better displays to show, though, like for example the display of Nokia E60 which has the same resolution but boasts the impressive 16 million colors. The thing though is that there are less than minimal visual differences between the two displays even when compared side by side.

The active display contains information about the network coverage, the battery status, date, time, operator name. If you change the graphic theme you may find different clocks to appear on the active display. There is also the stand-by display row which shows 6 applications you can set and the calendar's today's tasks and events. The next lines can be filled with information about missed calls, received messages or e-mails or the song you're currently playing.

Driving in the fast lane

Nokia N80 runs on Series 60 user interface of third generation. The Symbian operating system works very well on the phone and is quite fast. The only exception is the starting of the camera application, which takes a couple of seconds to load. Generally, there is a nice performance increase in comparison to the previous 2nd generation S60 user interface. We are quite pleased with the response of the operating system and would recommend it heartily if it wasn't the incompatibility with the applications written for the previous versions.

Currently, there aren't many applications written for this version of Symbian and that seems to be a problem for the owners of any phone with that OS. We expect that this shortage of 3rd party software would be remedied by the end of the summer.

The phone has an Offline mode which works as an Airplane mode, switching off the phone features of Nokia N80 but allowing the user to use the other possibilities of the device. The Offline mode can be used if you don't insert a SIM card in the phone.

The phone's main menu can be viewed either in matrix grid of 4 x 3 icons or in list view. If you choose the list view you will be able to see 5 items at a time. Most of the submenus also allow changing the desired view.

The Multimedia button brings up on the display a picture of the four ways of the navigation button and the appropriate applications assigned to the four directions plus the confirmation center button. The assigned applications are customizable, of course.

Nokia N80 has 40 MB internal memory and a miniSD memory card slot. The phone will come with 128 MB card enclosed in the package. Nokia's choice of the miniSD card type is very good for the users as those cards are cheap and reach up to 2 GB capacity. It seems that the manufacturer has decided to use miniSD in its high-end models.

Another great feature of N80 is the voice recognition system which can be used both for dialing contacts and starting applications. It doesn't need to have your commands pre-recorded, in fact it handles most of the voice commands you give it. The shortcut for starting the voice application is long press of the right soft key.

There are several preinstalled themes on the phone but they don't seem to make significant changes in the user interface. They change the wallpaper and the color scheme only. Nokia N80 has six default ringing profiles (including the Offline mode). The user can create custom profiles as easily as can modify the existing ones.

There is an interesting option in the settings menu called Reject Call with SMS. It means that after you reject a call, the phone automatically sends a SMS to the caller, explaining why you have rejected his call. This option can be very useful, indeed.

Endless phonebook

The phonebook of Nokia N80 looks like just like a normal Nokia Symbian phonebook. It has no limit of the contacts as it uses the free memory and thus can hold an enormous amount of entries. They can be ordered by first or last name and can be searched by letter-by-letter typing of the desired name.

New contacts can be assigned more than 30 different fields and numbers. You can have a look at the screenshots we've provided just below this paragraph. Naturally, you can assign ringtones to contacts of your choice, but we couldn't find an option to assign a personal video clip, however. Synchronization with PC works seamlessly, too.

Loud and clear

Nokia N80 signal reception is perfect and it has network coverage even in underground spaces. The phone has brilliant speaker quality and the sound during conversations is very clear and without any interferences. The loudspeaker of the phone works very well and provides loud sound.

Ringtone volume is sufficient enough and is audible even in crowded places. The vibration of the phone is not very strong but is quite enough for the user to feel that someone is calling or messaging him.

Nothing goes unnoticed

The Calls log of Nokia N80 contains three tabs for Dialed, Received and Missed calls. Every tab can hold up to 10 call records with their date and time. However, if you enter the Log application from the menu, you will find yourself in a list of all call records and data transfers and sessions which have taken place in the last 30 days. This includes even the WLAN connections.

Messaging is great, typing is not

Typing messages can be a trick with N80. As the top row of the numeric keypad is so hard to reach, it's quite hard for one to type a message without efforts. The other keys are easy to use, though. The SMS and MMS editors are separate and you cannot transform a SMS into a MMS during the typing process.

The SMS editor displays a counter of the characters left of the 160 limit. It also displays in brackets the number of separate messages the message will be divided into. The display allows 6 lines to be shown en bloc. Delivery reports appear on the screen when the keypad is not locked. After that, they are stored in a separate folder in the Messaging sub-menu.

The MMS editor is very intuitive and easy to use. Multiple email accounts are supported. N80 works with POP3 and IMAP4 protocols. The email client can download either the headers only or the full messages. Attachments are supported as well. This e-mail client manages most user needs regarding email communication but does not take full advantage of the great display. Regrettably, it seems that currently there are no 3rd party email client alternatives for this Symbian version.

Let's get loud

The Music Player of the N80 is very good. It has an equalizer, supports Playlists and the phone's loud speaker is very good and loud. The supported file formats are MP3, AAC, m4a, eAAC+ and WMA. Of course, the player can run in the background. The controls of the player are made very intuitive using the 4-way control button. It also manages M3U playlist format seamlessly and can even handle the file automatically if it is placed in the same directory as the music files . A good advice to the users is to use USB 2.0 card readers for transferring music files as this way is much faster than the Nokia Pop-port transfers. Of course, Wi-Fi transfers are also an option.

The phone also has a Real Player and a Flash player preinstalled. The FM radio application is very good and the only problem is that is lacks RDS. You can preset and save your favorite stations or you can switch them manually. Nokia N80 radio application is a Visual Radio, which means that it uses the available GPRS/EDGE/UMTS or Wi-Fi connections to download information from the radio stations about the current song and artist. There aren't many radio stations that support that service, though.

3 megapixel

For a detailed review of the camera qualities of Nokia N80, check out our camera shootout between Nokia N80 and Sony Ericsson K800. Even if not as good as a camera, N80 manages to keep up with a photo-oriented phone like Sony Ericsson K800.

In short, the camera of the phone is 3 megapixel one and makes really good photos, although it lacks autofocus. Nokia N80 uses fixed focus with macro mode instead. The view finder application is very easy to use. It can only operate in horizontal view. The camera supports self-timer pictures, sequence of pictures, different shooting modes (+night mode), white balance, exposure value, different color effects (sepia, black & white, etc.), sharpness, brightness, contrast, color saturation.

Instead of implementing real manual controls, Nokia has chosen to use "scenes", called "shooting mode". You can select scenes like Portrait, Landscape, Sport or Night Portrait and the camera will hopefully adjust to the situation.

The advanced sequence mode option can be very amusing. You can set the phone to make a sequence of pictures in a preset interval of time and then you can make very interesting time-lapse videos of those pictures. Of course, the phone should be absolutely still during the shooting sequence. You can consider using lower resolution to fit more pictures on the card. To make a movie from the still frames it is possible to use PC software like VirtualDub. You can search the web for “time-lapse movies” to get some ideas.

Video

The secondary VGA camera works in vertical mode because it is supposed to be used for video calls and thus is in “portrait” orientation. Nokia N80 records video in the high 352 x 288 pixels resolution (CIF). The phone can record audio during video recording and allows the users to zoom while recording. It uses the free memory and thus has no limit of the video records. It also has various settings to utilize the video application to suit the user's taste perfectly.

Wi-Fi browsing makes a difference

The phone supports GPRS, EDGE, Wi-Fi, UMTS, PTT, Bluetooth and IrDa. Nokia N80 works with Bluetooth Specification 1.2 supporting the following profiles: Basic Printing Profile, Generic Access Profile, Serial Port Profile, Dial-up Networking Profile, Headset Profile, Handsfree Profile, Generic Object Exchange Profile, Object Push Profile, File Transfer Profile, Basic Imaging Profile, SIM Access profile, and Human Interface Device Profile. Unfortunately, the A2DP profile is not among them which makes impossible the use of stereo Bluetooth headset with the phone.

USB 2.0 is also supported with the assistance of a USB cable. When connected to a PC , one of three modes can be chosen for the handset : “Mass storage” - memory card is available as a removable USB drive, no drivers are required; “PC Suite” - standard mode; “Picture Bridge” - direct access to printer, which supports PictBridge. The fast data transfer can be used via GPRS, EDGE or 3G UMTS. You can also try the Wi-Fi connectivity, in which case you have to be near a Wi-Fi hotspot.

You can set the phone to detect and connect automatically to such hotspots or you can search them manually. When you are connected, N80 creates an access point for the hotspot and starts using its Internet broadband. The connection speed depends on the distance from the hotspot and on the provider. The signal is displayed as the network signal strength.

Further on the phone is the first UPnP (Universal Plug & Play) enabled handset on the market. The UPnP technology is the wireless alternative to the well known Plug & Play standard that allows seamless connection between different devices. In the future the UPnP enabled devices which have some sort of wireless connectivity options such as Wi-Fi or Bluetooth could easily communicate with other intelligent devices without the need for drivers or user configuration. Thus in several years you could be commanding you entire set of home appliances with the help of your smartphone or PDA only - and what's more – you could do that from your office.

Just like on PC

Browsing with Nokia N80 is a sheer delight. There are two separate web browser applications. One of them is much simpler and reminds us of the browser implemented in older models. The new one is entirely a different story. It makes even very sophisticated pages fit on the screen and displays web pages just as on PC. There is no doubt that the great display helps a lot for this.

There is even a mouse cursor which can be operated through the four-way navigation button. Surprisingly, it works great and is very easy to control. A semi-transparent mini-map of the page displays on the screen when scrolling a webpage. The mini-map can also be accessed by a shortcut – the “8” key. You can zoom in and out on the page using the “*” and “#” buttons. It's amazing to see how small the text can be and still remain readable. In fact, this browser fits more information in a single screen than the IE browser on the VGA display of Qtek 9000!

Most of the sites we visited (including gsmarena.com, take a look at the screenshots) looked exactly like on the PC. Even when loading complex pages, the web browser was operating fast and there was no slowdown in the scrolling speed. The browser also loads Flash clips (not all of them, pitifully) and has no problems dealing with Java Scripts. All-in-all, it's an impressive job from Nokia.

Smart organizer

The phone has various organizer applications and features. It features a dual clock. You can set two different times and dates in two time zones. The Calendar has Month, Week and Day view. You can assign Meeting, Anniversary, Memo and To-do tasks in the Calendar. You can also put alarms on those assignments.

There is also an Office icon in the main menu and it leads to a folder with Notes, Converter, Calculator, Recorder and Quickoffice. The Converter converts Currencies, Area, Energy, Length, Mass, Power, Pressure, Temperature, Time, Velocity and Volume. The calculator is very simple and easy to use. Regrettably, the Recorder has a one minute limit for voice records. This seems quite illogical since the phone has such powerful features, enough internal memory and a memory card slot.

The Quickoffice opens various office files. Word and Excel files are supported, of course. They can be viewed seamlessly. Zooming, Scrolling, Resizing are supported as well. Regrettably, you cannot modify them in any way. There is also a Data Transfer application in the Tools submenu. It is used to transfer contacts and organizer items from one Nokia phone to another.

Software issues

There are several applications preinstalled in the phone: an IM application for chat with other users; Kodak application for sharing and sending pictures on the Internet . There is also an application for connecting a wireless keyboard to the phone.

One of the main issues of Nokia N80 is that the new Symbian 9.1 operating system is not compatible with applications written for older versions. Thus you would have difficulties finding additional software for this phone. We could only hope that by the end of the summer new 3rd party applications would begin to gradually emerge on the market.

3D Snake labyrinth

N80 has two preinstalled games : Snakes and Card Deck. “Snakes” is a 3D version of the popular Snake game of the Nokia phones. It is quite hard but interesting and we found it very amusing. Card Deck is a package of several card games like Klondike, Golf, etc...Of course, you can install additional games, in case you find any, though.

All-in-one tool

Our opinion is that Nokia N80 is a brilliant business phone with powerful equipment and many great features. Probably many would not share our enthusiasm and will say that it's too big or uncomfortable to use but we consider these drawbacks as minor. Now the heavy price of the phone will be the main disadvantage that will dishearten many potential customers. Considering the fact that this phone offers 3G support, Wi-Fi Internet connectivity, a 3 megapixel camera and the advanced Symbian 9.1 OS we don't find it strange at all that there are many people willing to pay even the hefty introductory price.