The Wi-Fi-enabled Nokia N80 is about to hit Blighty and here at Crave we've been lucky enough to get our tech-loving hands on it for a much-anticipated inspection. It can only be described as a combination of the Nokia N70 and 6280, with a bunch of features that could probably be used to design and make a Tomahawk missile. (Disclaimer: Crave does not endorse the creation of weapons of mass destruction.)
The N80 has a 3-megapixel camera, Bluetooth, infrared, quad-band, EDGE and WLAN connectivity, a miniSD slot that can support up to a 2GB card and a secondary 0.3-megapixel (VGA) camera for video calling. It runs on S60 3rd edition software on Symbian OS and comes preloaded with a bunch of applications such as RealPlayer and Flash Player, so you can play and access a host of media files.
Via Wi-Fi, EGPRS or 3G, you can browse the Web with the built-in Web browser or download content such as games and ringtones. It also has an email client you can set up to access a POP3 or IMAP4 email account, and it lets you view certain attachments using a proprietary document viewer.
We were very impressed with the picture quality of both the camera and the 36 by 45mm, 262k colour screen, which is not only large enough to view images properly, but also comes with a light sensor that adjusts the screen's brightness according to the ambient light.
This isn't the perfect phone -- although we're prepared to say it's very close. It's still too big as a viable 'mobile' phone, measuring a chunky 50 by 95 by 26mm and the battery life is zapped by the Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity. After only one day of listening to music and browsing the Web, the battery died on us. We didn't even have a chance to say, "Who cares if it costs over £300, we love this thing."
Nokia bigwig Anssi Vanjoki insisted at the Berlin launch of the new N-series handsets that we refer to them as multimedia computers, or MCs. Unfortunately, like all portable computers the battery life just isn't good enough yet and until that gets sorted, we can't give this phone a perfect score. -AL
Update: more images and a full review of the Nokia N80 are now live in our Reviews channel.
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