The Nokia N82 comes with a huge array of features, just some of which include:

  • 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss lens
  • Autofocus
  • Xenon flash
  • 240 x 320 pixel 2.4″ screen with 16 million colours
  • DVD quality video recording
  • Quad-band GSM, 3G, HSDPA and EDGE connectivity
  • Assisted GPS
  • FM radio
  • USB 2.0
  • TV-Out

We’ll take them one at a time!

The Nokia N82’s camera


First up is the camera. It’s a good ‘un! Five megapixels, Carl Zeiss lens, autofocus and powerful xenon flash for night shots. The flash works particularly well, as you can see from the pic below. My back yard is pretty dark at night, yet the flash works well and isn’t lost in the darkness of the night.

 

Picture quality during the day is just as good too (see below). You get the same camera options and interface as you do for other N-Series phones (see my Nokia E90 review for more details), but with a 5 megapixel camera and a reasonable speed, you get much better pictures, certainly better than with the E90 anyway.

 

When you take a picture, the screen automatically adjusts to landscape mode. Alternatively, turn the phone 90 degrees and the screen will also adjust to landscape mode (yes, it has an accelerometer!) Press the dedicated camera button down half way for autofocus to work its magic, then snap away.

 

Perfect results every time! (well, not every time, but it’s easy to take good pics most of the time!)

Video recording

I was impressed with the video camera on the N82, as well. For such a small phone, the video recording capabilities are extremely good. Although obviously not as good as with a dedicated camcorder, it nevertheless is on a par with some digital cameras, and produces much better results than the quality of video you see on YouTube.

 

The sound is captured well, images are crisp and clear, and even complicated scenes are rendered rather well,as you can see from the pic I uploaded onto YouTube, below.

 

Update: Seems YouTube has compressed the hell out of the video, as it looks much better than this on my PC! Not sure what’s happened to the sound, either.

Speaking of which, one of the things I really like about the N82 is how easy it is to upload your content onto sites such as YouTube. You record your video, then select the “share” icon, select which service you want to upload the video too, and your video is immediately uploaded! Brilliant! More of that later though.

GPS


The N82 also comes with Assisted GPS. The ‘Assisted’ bit in the acronym means the phone triangulates its location from neighbouring basestations as well as from the GPS satellites in order to identify its location much more quickly than it would using satellites alone. It works really well, too, and was able to lock onto my location the first tie I tried it within 10 seconds or less. Better still, it retains your location even when indoors and out of the line of sight of the satellites.

 

Nokia Maps 2.0 on the N82

One feature I’m not too keen on, though, is Nokia maps (left). Having GPS inside your phone is a wonderful idea, and it’s got me out of sticky situations on more than one occasion (I do have a habit of getting lost a lot!)

 

However, Nokia Maps 2.0 is not the easiest application to navigate. The phone’s screen is small, and Nokia Maps doesn’t always show you a road name until you’ve zoomed in a lot, by which time every other road on the map has been zoomed off the screen, and you’ve lost all context as to where the road your looking at is in relation to the rest of the world!

 

This in itself wouldn’t be a problem, as it’s still useful having a GPS phone, even if the mapping application isn’t that great. It makes you slower, but at least you can still find your way, which is surely better than remaining permanently lost (or, worse,asking someone for directions!) However, Nokia has some serious competition in the shape of Google Maps, which installs easily on the N82, and which also uses the N82’s GPS unit to identify your home location.

 

Google Maps on the N82

Google Maps (left) is at least twice as good as Nokia Maps 2.0. The names of roads are displayed at nearly every level of zoom, it loads much faster than Nokia Maps, ensuring you can move around easily and quickly (Nokia Maps can take forever to redraw in areas with a lot of detail, such as cities), and with the addition of satellite view, you get to see your actual surroundings from above, not just abstract lines, which is something Nokia Maps just can’t do.

 

This is hugely ironic, as Nokia spent literally billions buying NavTeq, the mapping company that makes the maps for both Nokia Maps and Google Maps, yet it’s Google whose resultant application is by far the easier of the two to use.

 

As such, The N82 as a GPS phone works really well, but use it with Google Maps, not Nokia Maps (sorry Nokia!)

Connectivity

The N82 comes with as much connectivity as you could possibly need. Quad band GSM, 3G, HSDPA, EDGE and WiFi ensure it’ll connect to just about anything anywhere! What’s more impressive is the ease at which it is able to connect to these networks. I inserted my T-Mobile SIM from E90, for example, inserted it into the N82, and just like that it configured itself and was connecting straight to the Internet without me having to enter a single thing.

 

Hooking up to WLAN was just as easy. It finds my home network easily, I enter the security key, and it just connects. No fuss or hassle, just instant connection. Very impressive.

Music


The N82 is a multimedia phone, and so its features don’t just stop at video and pictures: there’s also music to consider. The N82 comes with a good Mp3 player, complete with graphic equalizer (which includes an option to increase the bass, although it seemed to have no discernible effect whatsoever!), playlists and some neat visualizations (left).

 

What I found extremely impressive was the N82’s ability to multitask: I was listening to Moby on its Mp3 player, watching a visualization and downloading a 10MB file, and neither the visualization nor the music skipped even a single beat. Very impressive.

 


In addition to the MP3 player, there’s also an FM radio, a dedicated PodCast application for finding, subscribing to and listening to PodCasts, and a dedicated icon to Nokia’s music store (left).

 

This is actually quite good, being extremely simple to browse, and giving you the option of listening to 30 seconds of a tune before downloading it directly over the air onto your N82.

 

Better still, the music you download is not security protected: it’s just an MP3 file that can be played on your N82, on your PC – in fact, wherever you want.

 

About time, too – after all, you bought the music, no-one stops you using your CD in someone else’s CD player!

 

Sorry, I feel a rant coming on, but that’s for another day!

 

Suffice to say that the N82 has music playing abilities by the bucketload, and the ease at which it connects to the Web makes finding and listening to new music a genuine pleasure.

Mobile Games


I wasn’t sure whether to put this section under features or software, but given that it’s all part of the multimedia experience of the N82, I figured I’d shove it under features.

 

The N82 is designed for fun, and that extends to playing games. The N82 can connect to Nokia’s N-Gage platform, which lets you download new games, try before you buy, and challenge friends to multiplayer games either via Bluetooth or the mobile network. It’ll even keep track of your scores in a giant worldwide league table.

 

What about the games themselves though? Well obviously it’s no PS3 killer, but the N82 is certainly capable of playing some pretty good 3D games.

 

System Rush, for example, is a pretty accomplished WipeOut clone, and there’s even a version of Quake that you can download. None of these match the sheer playability of Bubble Breaker on Windows Mobile, however, but fortunately you can download a free version of JawBreaker, which is just Bubble Breaker for the S60 platform.

 

If that doesn’t do it for you, there’s a 3D version of Snake for you (above).

 

In short, the games on the N82 look extremely promising, and with its integration of the N-Gage platform, you should always have new games to try out.

Buy the Nokia N82

The Nokia N82 is a high-end phone with a budget price. We’ve found the best deals include:

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