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source: hardwarezone.com
Bright Delight
By Seow Tein Hee
Services and devices. The two core focus of the Finnish mobile phone giant, Nokia, have recently come full circle. And to showcase another well-equipped N-series device, we spent some quality time with the new Nokia N85 and here's our own assessment.
Finger Delight (Not)
There's much we'd like to discuss about the N85's basic design. With a streamlined and contoured layout, the slider phone has the usual navigation buttons as you might have seen on various slider phones such as the Nokia N81.
In particular, it adopts the dual sliding model akin to the Nokia N96 that hides four other buttons at the top of the device, which acts as the multimedia and dedicated gaming keys for the user. Like most of its recent devices, the N85's five-way navigation pad doubles up as a scroller for the Navi-wheel. As usual, we decided to switch the Navi-wheel off and do it the old fashioned way.
What we had no preparation for, is the stiffness of the navigation keys. This isn't an isolated problem either, as we found ourselves facing an unresponsive and flat keypad. It took us up to 40 seconds to type out a full test sentence. The device's sides and its back, however, are loaded with buttons that are easy to access, and are in fact useful.
Though you can easily unlock the phone with a slide of the display, the N85 also comes with a dedicated lock key on the right. This allows you to unlock your phone without requiring to slide the phone up or press buttons to awaken it. Its 5-megapixel camera located at the rear is well-protected by a sliding lens cover, but there are times when the cover accidentally slid open as we took it out of our pockets.
Power Efficiency Delight
With Nokia devices, it's gotten to a point when we are rarely surprised by the design and features of its newer devices. But the N85 did toss us a bone here: a 2.6-inch OLED screen. To say the least, we were wowed by the richness of the colors and screen brightness from the 16M colors OLED screen. This bodes especially well for Nokia's N-Gage platform, and we did have a good run with the screen's 240 x 320 resolution, though the stiff keys dampened the fun.
Music playback was the usual standard fare as with its other N-series devices, and with the introduction of its OLED screen, we took a closer look at its video playback capability. Video watching, even on a bright day out in the sun, was definitely possible but you won't be able to fully enjoy the well balanced colors due to the sunlight glare.
Also, OLED screens are supposedly more energy efficient. With a combination of multimedia playback, cellular usage and having Wi-Fi and Bluetooth active for a moderate amount of time, the 1200mAh battery performed as usual, lasting up to two days of usage, with no discernible improvement over other devices that comes close to its specifications.
A Delightful End?
If you are feeling as overwhelmed as we are with the number of Nokia devices, that's not the end of it, according to a possible development that was leaked on the web recently. But ultimately, we do hope there'll be more to look forward to. The Nokia N85 does bring something fresh to the table with its OLED screen on top of the usual N-series features, but stiff competition means Nokia needs to up the ante in the very near future.
Product Specifications
* Network: GSM 850/900/1800/1900; HSDPA, WCDMA 900/2100
* Operating system: Symbian OS 9.3, S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2
* Display: 320 x 240 pixels, 2.6-inch OLED, 16 million colors
* Camera: 5-megapixel Carl Zeiss lens with auto-focus and dual LED flash
* Memory: 85MB internal memory, microSD expandability up to 8GB
* Connectivity: Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP, 3.5mm AV connector, USB 2.0 (microUSB), TV out, GPS with A-GPS, HSDPA
* Battery: 1200 mAh
* Standby time: Up to 363 hours
* Talk time: Up to 6 hours 50 minutes
* Dimensions: 103 x 50 x 16mm
* Weight: 128g
* Price: S$928
source: hardwarezone.com
Bright Delight
By Seow Tein Hee
Services and devices. The two core focus of the Finnish mobile phone giant, Nokia, have recently come full circle. And to showcase another well-equipped N-series device, we spent some quality time with the new Nokia N85 and here's our own assessment.
Finger Delight (Not)
There's much we'd like to discuss about the N85's basic design. With a streamlined and contoured layout, the slider phone has the usual navigation buttons as you might have seen on various slider phones such as the Nokia N81.
In particular, it adopts the dual sliding model akin to the Nokia N96 that hides four other buttons at the top of the device, which acts as the multimedia and dedicated gaming keys for the user. Like most of its recent devices, the N85's five-way navigation pad doubles up as a scroller for the Navi-wheel. As usual, we decided to switch the Navi-wheel off and do it the old fashioned way.
What we had no preparation for, is the stiffness of the navigation keys. This isn't an isolated problem either, as we found ourselves facing an unresponsive and flat keypad. It took us up to 40 seconds to type out a full test sentence. The device's sides and its back, however, are loaded with buttons that are easy to access, and are in fact useful.
Though you can easily unlock the phone with a slide of the display, the N85 also comes with a dedicated lock key on the right. This allows you to unlock your phone without requiring to slide the phone up or press buttons to awaken it. Its 5-megapixel camera located at the rear is well-protected by a sliding lens cover, but there are times when the cover accidentally slid open as we took it out of our pockets.
Power Efficiency Delight
With Nokia devices, it's gotten to a point when we are rarely surprised by the design and features of its newer devices. But the N85 did toss us a bone here: a 2.6-inch OLED screen. To say the least, we were wowed by the richness of the colors and screen brightness from the 16M colors OLED screen. This bodes especially well for Nokia's N-Gage platform, and we did have a good run with the screen's 240 x 320 resolution, though the stiff keys dampened the fun.
Music playback was the usual standard fare as with its other N-series devices, and with the introduction of its OLED screen, we took a closer look at its video playback capability. Video watching, even on a bright day out in the sun, was definitely possible but you won't be able to fully enjoy the well balanced colors due to the sunlight glare.
Also, OLED screens are supposedly more energy efficient. With a combination of multimedia playback, cellular usage and having Wi-Fi and Bluetooth active for a moderate amount of time, the 1200mAh battery performed as usual, lasting up to two days of usage, with no discernible improvement over other devices that comes close to its specifications.
A Delightful End?
If you are feeling as overwhelmed as we are with the number of Nokia devices, that's not the end of it, according to a possible development that was leaked on the web recently. But ultimately, we do hope there'll be more to look forward to. The Nokia N85 does bring something fresh to the table with its OLED screen on top of the usual N-series features, but stiff competition means Nokia needs to up the ante in the very near future.
Product Specifications
* Network: GSM 850/900/1800/1900; HSDPA, WCDMA 900/2100
* Operating system: Symbian OS 9.3, S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2
* Display: 320 x 240 pixels, 2.6-inch OLED, 16 million colors
* Camera: 5-megapixel Carl Zeiss lens with auto-focus and dual LED flash
* Memory: 85MB internal memory, microSD expandability up to 8GB
* Connectivity: Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP, 3.5mm AV connector, USB 2.0 (microUSB), TV out, GPS with A-GPS, HSDPA
* Battery: 1200 mAh
* Standby time: Up to 363 hours
* Talk time: Up to 6 hours 50 minutes
* Dimensions: 103 x 50 x 16mm
* Weight: 128g
* Price: S$928