At 3.7 by 2 by 0.9 inches and 5.2 ounces, the N80 is a boxy, businesslike slider phone that feels solid in the hand. The 352-by-416 screen is just bright enough and shockingly high-res, so photos and text look beautiful. A tiny VGA self-portrait camera sits above the screen. Below the screen, there's a bunch of confusingly labeled buttons that turn out to be pick-up, hang-up, menu, clear, two soft keys, and a quick application-access button. The camera button is on the side, encouraging you to turn the phone 90 degrees to use the 3MP camera on the back. Dedicated music playback and volume buttons are, sadly, absent. Slide the screen up to reveal a keypad of tightly packed, rectangular black keys.
The N80 has excellent reception and good sound quality through the earpiece and speakerphone. Calls that I made from a noisy street came through clearly, and the speakerphone is loud enough for most situations. Speaker-independent voice dialing lacks digit dialing, but it generally works with names in your contact book, and it works over Bluetooth. Battery life, at a little more than 5 1/2 hours of talk time, is short for a GSM phone, and it drops further with extensive Wi-Fi use. Still, the N80's battery life is comparable with that of some CDMA phones on Sprint and Verizon, so I won't judge it too harshly. The phone is ideal for world travelers, with quint-band roaming: the usual four global bands and the 2,100-MHz band used for high-speed data in Europe and Asia.
Connectivity is a big strength here: You get EDGE, stereo Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi. EDGE speeds were a bit poky, at around 80 Kbps, when the phone was hooked up to a laptop as a modem. Wi-Fi zipped along at up to 925 Kbps using the built-in Web browser. I connected the phone up to several Plantronics headsets, a PC, and a Mac via Bluetooth. File transfers, PC modem use, and syncing with Microsoft Outlook via Nokia's PC Suite all worked fine. I couldn't get the N80 to sync with the Mac, though file transfers worked.
The N80's flashiest feature, of course, is the 3MP camera, the first of its kind on a U.S. cell phone. It's pretty basic in terms of options: no optical zoom, no lens cap, no autofocus, and a standard, weak LED flash, but at least there's a macro switch. As with all camera phones, the pictures it takes are barely passable in the realm of dedicated digital cameras; they're soft, with only about 700 lines of resolution, a slightly hazy look, and some visible color noise. At first glance, you might think 2MP camera-phone shots like the ones from the Samsung MM-A800 look better. But that's because the MM-A800's shots are automatically digitally sharpened; the N80's extra pixels give you more realistic lines and color gradations. You can save pictures in the 40MB of onboard memory or on a mini-SD card, or beam them to a PC or printer using Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or a USB cable. This is a huge step forward for camera phones.
The lack of autofocus and optical zoom can also be overlooked because nobody's gotten them to work on camera phones yet. The two optical-zoom camera phones I've tested, the Samsung A940 and A970, had focus and shutter-speed problems, and autofocus on other phones increases shutter delay. With nearly a second of shutter delay on the N80 already, taking pictures with autofocus would likely incur an unbearable wait.
The N80's video camera mode is far better than that of most competitors, though, able to capture 352-by-288 videos at 15 frames per second. Outdoor footage looks great; indoor footage is noisy but still viewable.
Web browsing on the N80 is excellent. The built-in Nokia Web and optional Opera browsers both handle a full range of pages including tables and frames, though they can't deal with Flash or embedded Windows Media. Nokia's e-mail program handles POP3 and IMAP mail with attachments, but doesn't do BlackBerry-style push. There's an N80 client for Cingular's Xpress Mail push solution, according to Lars Aase, marketing director for Seven (the company that makes Xpress Mail), but Cingular hasn't decided whether to support it yet.
The N80 is also a Symbian smartphone, running the latest version 9 of Symbian OS. Symbian is popular in Europe but relatively unknown here. The user interface is sluggish compared with Palm OS and Windows Mobile devices. When you need to switch screens, the screen goes blank and then redraws. Web-page scrolling feels slower than on the Motorola Q or Palm Treo 700p, and the device occasionally fell behind my typing.
The N80 comes with a decent Microsoft Office document reader (a document editor is available at extra cost) and the fun muvee auto-video-editing application. Also available for download are a PDF reader from Adobe, a good instant-messaging app called Agile Messenger, at least two other MP3 player applications, and a nifty program called SmartMovie that reformats videos for the phone. (The N80's processor is too slow to handle full-screen, 30-fps video.)
For music, you can choose between an FM radio and an MP3 player. Although the N80's MP3 player is relatively basic, with no support for syncing with major PC jukeboxes, the phone supports Universal Plug & Play (UPnP). In theory, that lets it connect to TVs, set-top boxes, and home stereos to play music and show photos stored on the phone over a 802.11g Wi-Fi network. Right now UPnP peripherals aren't plentiful, so Nokia includes a UPnP PC application, SimpleCenter, with the N80. Loaded up, it provides an easy interface for transferring media files to and from the phone using Wi-Fi—though transfers are slow, at about 10 seconds per megabyte. The phone's stereo speakers sound good, but music over Plantronics Pulsar 590 stereo Bluetooth headphones sounded muddy.
The N80 is available unlocked from Dynamism for a hefty $799. It will work equally well on Cingular's or T-Mobile's networks. It'll also probably be available later this summer directly from Nokia and at Nokia's flagship store in Chicago. If a carrier picks it up officially, expect to see that price drop by $200 or more.
As a bleeding-edge device, the N80 stands alone in the market. Yes, the T-Mobile SDA is a terrific phone (and far more affordable), and it syncs with Windows Media Player—but it doesn't have the N80's high-res camera, UPnP, choice of top-notch Web browsers or stereo Bluetooth. It is also super-easy to get pictures off the camera and onto your PC. Pouring on the features—and making them work—earns this powerful phone an Editors' Choice.
SPEC DATA :
- Service Provider: AT&T, T-Mobile
- Operating System: Symbian OS
- Screen Size: 2.2 inches
- Camera: No
- Bluetooth: Yes
- Web Browser: Yes
- Network: GSM, UMTS, UMTS
- Bands: 850, 900, 1800, 1900, 2100
- High-Speed Data: GPRS, EDGE, UMTS
- Special Features: Music
- Notes: 1.8", 128x160 65k color CSTN display
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