NOKIA N85

THE LOOK AND FEEL
I liked the look and feel of it straight away but still not as sexy looking as some of the new touch screen phones. I have just got the Nokia N97 and was quite disappointed at how plasticy the back felt as I was used to the smooth glossy look and feel of the N85. It seems as though Nokia have taken a step backwards on the overall feel of the phone when making the N97 which is bad considering the spec and capability of it. So 5 Stars for the feel and 4 on the look simply because I personally prefer the larger screen phone's for internet.

SOFTWARE
Before this phone I had the Nokia N95 8G, this became faulty to water damage so I got the N85 through insurance and was told this had the new home screen which was made for easy internet access. I loved the new look of the home screen but shortly found that the phone was just not good enough to support it fully and kept freezing and getting confused with functions. So for software I would give it 3 stars.

FEATURES
It has a 5mp Carl Zeiss camera, Carl Zeiss is a tip top professional lens but the camera does not compare to my Lumix wide angle camera. The shutter can be slow and pictures come out blurry if there is a lot of movement going on e.g. kids. But for a straight forward still pic they do come out great. The video is high quality too you can get some good pics and videos in right conditions. It has a great music player and good sounds which can be enhanced with speaker attachments. It came with some good memory space 8G so plenty of storage space for music. Nokia has created a great gaming community called N-Gage which came already installed on the phone where you can purchase games there are also online multiplayer games. You can log progress and make gaming friends, good for gamers. There is also Ovi - Nokia's app store where you can purchase apps. Saying this though there are not as many available for the N85 as there is for the N97. So for the features I give it 4Stars.

BATTERY
The battery life is average; I charge my phone everyday so as long as it lasts a day it does not bother me. Would probably last 2days max.

OTHER
I got this on Vodafone contract for free. If you were to buy this second hand then yes I would recommend it as a nice phone but I would not pay £300 for it. I don't think it is worth that. As a free contract yes it did me well until my upgrade.

Calling and texting is all very easy on this phone. A good home screen feature it did have was VIP Contacts with clicking down on the scroll and you could place four numbers here that you use most often. The email was also a lot better than on the N95 that I had. They would actually come through to the phone and I had it set to check every hour. Reading them was the problem it could read certain emails but struggled with attachments and HTML. The N97 handles this lot better.

Nokia have also changed the charger fitting on this, so no more one size standard charger that everyone is familiar with which is a bit of a pain as everyone had an old Nokia charger lying around somewhere which was good for back-up.

My overall score for the N85 is 3.5 Stars