Nokia N81 Special Edition, the review

Posted on March 18, 2008
Filed Under Nokia, Nokia N81 Special Edtion, Pictures, Videos

The Nokia N81 Special Edition. Whats make the N81 a Special Edition? The addition of 8gb of storage. So how does this phone stack up? Lets find out.

The Specifications.

1. GSM, 850, 900, 1800, 1900
2. WCDMA, 2100. Sorry US, not 3g for you
3. 8gb of storage built in
4. 3mp camera with flash, also forward facing camera
5. Wifi
6. Bluetooth

The Nokia N81 is a nice mix of a slider and multimedia phone. The N81 is build like a tank. The phone is a slider and that moves like butter. It has a nice weighty feel to it and with the metal sides along the case make the phone feel very solid.

The keypad is nice, but since all the keypad are on a flat surface with no key press down action, you have to pay attention to what key your pressing.

The camera is fast to shoot and takes surprising good pictures. I almost feel it takes better pictures the the 5mp camera on the N95. The screen has nice color tones, but a little washed out in direct sunlight. On the sides of the N81 are the a few buttons. On the right side is the volume rocker and the camera button. On the left side, clean no buttons at all. On top is a full size headphone jack, lock switch, and power button.

The buttons on the face are a little tight.

You have 12, thats right, 12 buttons, up there. In addition you have 2 more buttons at the top of the phones near the eat piece. More on this later.

The N81 has the n-gage gaming platform built in, as the need for some additional buttons are required. The game platform is decent. It allows you to download new games, play other n-gage users. The games look good and sound out the speakers is loud.

This is running the Symbian OS S2. So it has the usual complement of built in Nokia applications.

The built in mail application are a little weak, nothing new for the Symbian platform though. I used RoadSync to connect to my Exchange 2003 server at work. No issues, and can sync sub folders as well. The browser is the Nokia application. Bar none this is the best mobile browser out there. Too bad the phone is only Edge here in the US though.

There are just a few things holding this phone back from being the great N series phone.

1. Keypad has too much of smooth surface, but really has not bothered me.
2. No 3g for US. Kinda kills a really great phone.

Overall, Nokia has done it again, a great slider, with some very good multimedia features.

Thanks to Nseries WOM World for the review N81.