Nokia N - Martin S Quick Review

Nokia N - Martin's Quick Review

Summary: Nokia N - All the features under the sun

With a dual-sliding design and a stylish plum-and-silver colour scheme, the Nokia N packs a lot of features into a fairly small package. Youd expect it to weigh more than it does just g of phone, measuring mm x mm x mm. Sliding the phone downwards reveals the traditional keypad, whilst sliding in the opposite direction gives you access to the multimedia controls. The alphanumeric keypad is raised slightly, and respon...

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Article Body: Nokia N - All the features under the sun

With a dual-sliding design and a stylish plum-and-silver colour scheme, the Nokia N packs a lot of features into a fairly small package. Youd expect it to weigh more than it does just g of phone, measuring mm x mm x mm. Sliding the phone downwards reveals the traditional keypad, whilst sliding in the opposite direction gives you access to the multimedia controls. The alphanumeric keypad is raised slightly, and responsive to light touch. Blue back-lighting means you can easily see what youre typing. The LCD screen is large, bright and clear and resolves at x pixels. It is easy to view, even in direct sunlight, but you will need the included clear plastic screen protector to avoid scratches and finger marks.

Nokias N is undoubtedly feature-packed. Much of the hype surrounding it has to do with the included GPS functionality. Two mapping systems are available, both of which are free to view but the GPRS/G connection needed to access them isnt. Turn-by-turn navigational guiding also incurs additional charges. Using the phones keypad to operate the system proves a little trying and lack of volume is also a problem.

As the first phone to include a five megapixel camera, the N commands respect. Image quality is good, as is colour reproduction. As with most phone cameras, image sharpness suffers a little. In particular, the N really struggles with night shots, despite having a red-eye reduction flash. Theres an autofocus and macro, portrait, sports, sequence and burst shooting modes, plus the option to manually control white balance, colour tone and exposure. The phone can interface with web-based photo accounts including Flickr, Vox or Lifeblog.

The Nokia N functions well as a multi-media device it includes both video and music players. Theres support for MPC, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, WMA and MA audio formats, as well as MPEG-, H./AVC, H., GPP and RealVideo files. The quality of the bundled earphones isnt poor, but it is an advantage that the phone has a .mm headphone jack so that you can plug in better quality headphones if youre serious about your music. Here, the multimedia keypad really shines, with the previous, play/pause, stop and next keys offering intuitive control of the device. You can watch videos on the Nokia N, but the screen is really too small to do the feature justice.

A new feature is the Video Centre an RSS feeder for video content from Reuters and YouTube. Using this, you can download and stream video clips using Wi-Fi or your providers data service. Memory is adequate with MB of internal memory and a microSD slot that supports cards up to GB.

Unfortunately, the phone does feel a little cheap, with the sliding mechanism a bit loose and the plastic quality not as good as it should be, given the phones price tag. Battery life is another disappointing aspect of the phone, with only hours of talk time and up to hours of standby time. These figures are slightly better if youre using a traditional GSM network, but are still well below par. Use of the GPS or camera noticeably accelerates battery flattening.

If money isnt an object, the Nokia N offers a feature-packed phone in a light-weight, well-designed package.