Nokia N80 Smartphone Review

Organizer:

The Organizer is spread into different submenus – the calendar is located in the main menu for example. It can be viewed by month or week and you can easily add notes to a particular day with a few clicks; To-Do notes and Meetings are also displayed on the homescreen if the corresponding option is turned on (see Interface). Each entry in the calendar can be assigned and alarm to.

Other options like Calculator, Notes, Converter are located in the Office menu. Notes are just annotations with no option for adding an alarm like the To-Do notes. The Converter works with various quantities (Length, Weight, etc.) but the interface has not changed much if we compare it to older versions. Working with various types is still uncomfortable, as entering different values requires a movement from one row to another which is quite slow, while types are chosen from a drop-down list that usually takes a lot of time to unfold. The calculator has no scientific option – something that the lower level 6131 had. Alarms are housed in a third menu – Clock. The alarm is actually only one and you set it for a particular hour, as Symbian S60 has no capability for duplication, unless third party software is used. The World Clock is also located in this menu and the way it's used differs from standard one where you “move across the world map". Here you can add various cities that you like to view, which is very convenient and saves a lot of time.

Normal Clock		Alarm
		World Clock

Nokia has added third party software that comes with every smartphone and that's a way to broaden the phone's capabilities – you have QuickOffice which helps you out with the most frequently used document types – the ones from the Microsoft Office package. Unfortunately, the Office is still only a “viewer” and you cannot do any editing with it which is a major drawback. When viewing Word files, you can stylize the text by using various colors, highlighting, italic, bold and underline, but some Powerpoint files do not display properly. During the tests we opened two presentations, and the one with the white background was displayed, whereas the color one (a MS Powerpoint preloaded one) could not load the background image. A simple Excel document could also be viewed, but when we tried opening more complex ones (various colors, a lot of columns and sheets), they just could not visualized, so the application looked practically useless.

Office

Word

PowerPoint

PowerPoint

The Tools menu houses the integrated File Manager which we would've liked to feature an improved navigation too. Unlike PPC phones, it does not resemble the explorer we know from PCs and working with files is not quite fast.

Messaging:

The Messages menu has nothing new to offer –SMS/MMS and e-mails are easy to compose, while in My Folder you can find some templates which are very useful for that for text that is often used in messages. The T9 should help you enter text quickly, whereas the EDGE connection is a big plus when working with Emails, as well as the fast UMTS (or local Wi-Fi) which hugely reduces the time for waiting.

	MMS	Adding image	MMS
Inbox	Retrieving		Spam email
	Writing email		Writing email

Connectivity:

The N80 offers a lot of ways for establishing a connection and communication with other devices, both nearby and distant ones. Of course, there's an option for connecting the phone to a PC via a USB cable and it can be found in the package, as well as the Nokia PC Suite software. The phone can be recognized as a mass storage device but when used in this mode, the GSM receiver function is switched off.

For connectivity with nearby devices you can use the infrared technology, which is quite outdated and is rarely included in newer phone models. You can also use its “successor” – Bluetooth, which is a bit “old” too, as its version is 1.2 and multimedia profiles like A2DP are not supported. Something that differentiates the N80 from most other phones it the Wi-Fi -- a wireless network standard, which enables the phone to get access to the Internet via local networks, which can be found in many places called “Hot spots”. This not only provides a free Internet connection but also offers much higher theoretical speeds than EDGE, which for example is the data technology T-Mobile USA uses. The N80 is a quad-band GSM device with global roaming and for over-the-air data transfers it has both the GPRS/EDGE and the UMTS 3G standard support, which unfortunately works only on Europe's 2100 MHZ frequency. Nokia is expected to launch a US version of the device, which will have dual-band 850/1900 MHz UMTS support, but it's still not certain when it will be released and whether this will happen at all.     
 
Like the rest of the Symbian v9,1 S60 3rd edition interface phones, the N80 has a great Internet browser, which can display properly even very complicated web pages that are not designed for viewing with a mobile phone. We connected to our Work Network via the Wi-Fi and surfed PhoneArena, and by loading the RSS address we managed to easily take a quick look the latest news without generating too much traffic. Major advantages of the this browser are the easy scrolling with the mini-map that shows which part of the page you are currently viewing, and the History, which displays the rest of the pages you have visited as separate lists that you can choose from. Thus, we were able to see that we have also loaded Google and the PhoneArena page at YouTube, where we did not manage to stream a flash video, but that's something we were not able to do with a WM 5 PPC phone too.       

Bookmarks	RSS	RSS Loaded	Normal HTML
	History	History	History