Could you ask for more? (Nokia N82)

Member Name: Hectristic

Product:	Nokia N82
Date:	09/08/08 (40 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Quick, reliable, has all the latest features, excellent camera quality for a phone

Disadvantages: Battery life isn't too great, very expensive

Having owned a Nokia 6230i for one and a half years (a very reliable phone by the way), I decided it was time for an upgrade.

Let's start with the design:
The N82 is smaller than it's big brother the N95, noticeably so, which makes it easier to carry around with you and more comfortable and less unseemly when held to the face. The keys on the keypad are quite small and take some getting used to, for those with large thumbs this may be a problem. The phone is quite sturdy, and it feels quite solid and well built, so there is no worry snapping it. The camera buttons are conveniently placed on the side so it is easy to take pictures with.


Screen:
Although the screen is not as bright as that on some other phones, it is perfectly fine for day to day use, the colours and shapes are crisp, and the backlight even dims or brightens depending on the ambient light to conserve battery power.


Sound:
The phone comes with a full size 3.5mm headphone jack, so it is not necessary to buy proprietary headphones as in most other models of Nokia. This feature also allows you to connect phone to , for example, a stereo with an auxiliary input. The music player and radio perform very well, with a fast response when buttons are pressed. The two stereo speakers are placed on the side of the phone which works quite well.

Camera(s)
The camera is an amazing feature of this phone. Although as has been mentioned in one of the other reviews, it is not as good as an slr it can certainly hold its own against other dedicated five megapixel cameras on the market. It has a wealth of customisable options such as contrast settings, white balance, Iso settings, burst mode, and it also does video. The video quality is very good for that taken on a phone. Not pixelated at all if watched on a normal 22" monitor. The phone also has a CIF camera on the front for video calling, this performs adequately for its purpose just don't try and take any pictures with it as the quality is appaling due to its low resolution.

Connectivity
This phone offers Bluetooth,GPS,3G,and Wi-Fi to name but a few. The Wi-Fi is easy to setup and use, with support for WEP, WPA and WPA2. The range is good as it works fine all around my house and in the neighbours too! I've found it effective to a range of about 35 metres after which it came up with connection errors and it found the access point sporadically. The bluetooth is as to be expected, no significant speed differences between my old 6230i and this phone. It has 3G and GSM which allows it to work on practically all networks in the world. The GPS is brilliant. It can take anywhere from a minute to 5 minutes to get a lock, but when it does it never (in my experience) loses this even when under trees etc. To help with the lock on time, the phone offers A-GPS (Assisted GPS) which uses the phone network to get a rough estimate of your position first, however, this uses the GPRS network and so it incurs data costs if you havn't got a data package sorted out. The phone also offers a USB connection to your computer, so you can save and backup all the information from your phone onto your computer with the supplied software, it even allows you to write messages on your computer and send them through your phone!

The battery life on this phone isn't too impressive, I've found that it lasts around 3 days with sporadic use. However, this isn't a major concern as a charger is usually readily available.

Overall a very good feature packed phone which I wouldn't hesitate in buying again.

Summary: Overall a very good phone which I would not hesitate to buy again

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