Nokia N80 (A love letter)

Well, now that I’ve had my Nokia N80 for almost two weeks, I thought I’d report!

The coolest thing so far has been the MPEG-4 video playback – It’s friggin’ fantastic. I can convert videos on my Mac very easily, usually down to CIF resolution, 90 kbps, with stereo audio. My TV tuner software also converts to the same format easily, so I’ve been in the habit of recording lots of stuff from TV and copying it over to the phone, for those times when I’m sitting around with nothing to do. My only problem now is finding more of these times! Maybe I should catch public transport more…

Transferring videos (and anything else) to the phone is insanely easy – the ‘Browse Device’ function of OS X works perfectly with the N80, and with the latest Bluetooth built into both my Macbook Pro and my N80, transfers are fast.

The built-in speaker is very good quality, and gives clear loud audio. So, speakerphone functionality is great, and listening to music with it is even bearable.

The music player is quite buggy, and all but unusable, unfortunately. It plays music very well, and sounds as good as my iPod nano, but the ‘Update Library’ function, which is required to scan the disk for new music files, is busted. Well over three quarters of the music I put on the device causes the ‘Update Library’ scan to freeze up, leaving me with an almost-empty library. Sure, I can play individual tracks by navigating to them with the file browser, but that won’t make it move on to the next track once it finishes.
Not happy there – hopefully Nokia will release a firmware upgrade which will fix this bug.

Back to praise – the 3 megapixel camera is quite impressive. Quality is fine outdoors and in bright rooms; indoors and in low lighting conditions it is quite grainy. The built-in ‘flash’ doesn’t do much, as is expected. Still, it isn’t meant to replace a digital camera – the purpose of mobile phone cameras is really to capture that which would otherwise be lost. For that purpose, it’s perfect (and the photos it takes aren’t really that bad – like this one I took the other night).

The 352×416 display has to be seen to be believed – it’s very impressive. The display quality rivals that of my external LCD monitor, and what a resolution! Web browsing is fantastic, with Nokia’s new web browser, apparently based on Apple’s Safari’s Webcore.

…Which leads me onto the inbuilt WiFi. It works completely transparently, allowing all applications to use my web access at home, as would be expected. Range is adequate, and with it being 802.11g, speeds are great.

Unfortunately, Nokia have omitted a SIP voice-over-IP client from the device, but SIP is supported by libraries on the device, from what I can see. It would appear that a number of software companies are working on Symbian 60 v3 SIP clients which will work on the N80 (including SillyAnt), so hopefully it won’t be long. Thus, once the software is set up, I’ll hopefully be able to make VoIP calls from my N80 over my WiFi, meaning I will be able to access services like the Gizmo Project, to make free/cheap calls when I’m at home. Skype are busily working on a client for Symbian, so that should be available soon also.

Synchronising data with iSync is mostly pain-free – while the N80 isn’t technically supported yet, there is a hack one can perform to make iSync talk to the device. It’s worked fairly well, but alarms appear to be broken – all alarms I set in iSync appear on the device as being 10 hours earlier. It took a number of rude awakenings at 1am, 2am, 3am to figure that out. Unfortunately that’s a fairly severe bug, as I appear to need alarms to control my life – hopefully Apple will update iSync soon and add official support. Actually, Nova Media have released a plugin which apparently supports the N80. While some think this may just be the above hack, commercialised, it may provide a fix.

Update: I recently got the driver from Nova Media and it works like a charm. The plugin installation puts a lot of junk on the system – I installed, grabbed the N80 plugin (copied it to my desktop from the /Library/PhonePlugins folder), then uninstalled it, and copied the plugin back to my ~/Library/PhonePlugins folder.)

The inbuilt USB mass storage driver, allowing the memory card to be accessed directly by a computer, is quite buggy. I couldn’t remain connected to the N80 for more than a few minutes before Finder froze, and I had to force-remove the cable. This isn’t such a problem, as the Bluetooth transfer speeds with the ‘Browse Device’ utility are perfectly adequate.

Software availability still isn’t wonderful, but there’s more software available every day. The applications I use are available (Mobipocket, Agile messenger, mainly), which works fine for me. I even hear that Quake is being ported to Symbian 60 v2 – perhaps it’ll come to us soon, or I could grab the source and port it myself, something I’m considering doing.

I can’t say I’ve tried the 3G functionality yet, but I’m sure it’s all there. I have no one to video-call yet!

So, what else can I say? Battery life is reasonable, although I can’t give any definite figures. It lasts about 2 days if I don’t use it much, but I always leave Bluetooth on, and 3G is enabled – these are things I hear that drain battery power a bit. The thing feels smaller compared to my previous Nokia 6600, and the slide thing is cool (I like being able to lock the keypad by just sliding it shut). The buttons are a little tricky to operate sometimes, and I will occasionally miss a button when composing an SMS. The joypad tends to be easy to click when using the directions, which can sometimes lead to one finding oneself in a random menu somewhere. I can live with it!

So, the N80 has quite successfully fulfilled my gadget urges – and with the software coming out over the next few months, it should continue to remain a novelty, as it gets converted to a VoIP phone, universal IR remote control…mobile gaming platform? I’m going to have to make more time for this thing…

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