Thursday. Thursday is the day I bought this phone. At 3.30pm to be exact. The salesman was telling me that the black version had just come in and there were only 7 remaining. I said, yeah I know. Your colleague from the other branch I came from had reserved one for me.
Anyway, I couldn’t wait. When I got home, I opened the box, read all the printed literature twice while nursing Jack for his nap, and when asleep, began to play with the phone.
By dinner time I was in love. The first photo I took had me at hello. The subsequent ones (taken in the dark no less) had my son staring perplexed at the flash with a grinning mom at the helm.
My husband was bored at the raves I gave the phone all through dinner. “I’m glad you love it dear,” he said, looking at his spider handroll with more interest than warranted.
So I have raved enough and here are the 10 things I love about this phone in just 2 days of using it.
1. The Amazing Camera
5MP, Carl Zeiss lens, Xenon flash, in-built lens cover, the amazing ability to take beautiful pictures in the dark (I’ll post some that don’t feature a 2 year-old peering at the phone with a frown). It rocks better than my old Pentax Optio S (yes, it is ancient) and my Panasonic FX5 (ancient too). The beauty is that it works like a camera. It autofocuses, shows a green box when focused, snaps quickly with a fast shutter (1/1000 max, I recall reading). The camera is reason enough for buying it. Note: The N82 also comes with a 2GB MicroSD card.
2. Fast Surfing
Thanks to my previous experience setting up the WLAN on the Nokia e61i, I went back to the WLAN Advanced Settings (despite the warning) - Tools -> Settings -> Connection -> WLAN -> Options -> Advanced Settings -> TX power level = 10 mW. That speeded up my connection a lot and it was close to surfing on my Lenovo v100. Compared to the turtly Nokia e61i, this is the hare.
3. Rotating Screen
While surfing, this rocks. My concern before buying this or any other phone was that it would be losing that big screen (although the Nokia e61i has the same resolution). Rotating the screen to landscape increases the font and makes surfing much breezier.
And I haven’t even watched any videos yet.
4. Sleek Black Body
While I thought before handling it closely that the body would feel plasticky, the N82 surprised me. It actually feels both light and solid and sits perfectly in my hand.
The numbers on the keypad look tiny but work well even with my medium-sized fingers. The menu button is appropriately placed and although the green and red buttons took a while to get used to, with the amount of fondling I was doing, I got accustomed to their placing pretty fast.
I’ll be frank in saying it won’t win any awards for stand-out beauty but its subtle elegance makes it a winner in my eyes.
5. Seamless Integration to the Web
One-click to the web. Just click the globe button and you’re in. No more searching for wifi anymore. This one does it all for you.
And if you’re a Flickr user, you’ll love this function. Share Online promises a 3-click upload of photos and videos to the web. It even logs your progress. Success or failure. Useful for retries.
6. Does Not Overheat
I surf for hours. Okay. 2 hours. Play music for an hour here and there. But it doesn’t burn my hand like the e61i does. Probably because the e61i is metal and this one is plastic. Neither is very comforting though.
7. Cool Search Function
While this one looks ripped from Apple, the slide-out search looks cool and is very useful. It is a universal search that allows you to search the Internet or your own content, neatly categorised into every logical section you might keep content in, ranging from Notes to Bookmarks. I just love how the info is displayed. It is literally another way of navigating the phone.
8. The Gallery
It is remarkable how the Gallery loaded my son’s entire life from the day he was born to the last picture I snapped of him sleeping (the Flash woke him though - sorry baby! Note the pic of my annoyed baby on the right on why you shouldn’t snap photos too close to animals and children.) just twenty minutes ago. The smooth scrolling of the Gallery is reminiscent of Picasa’s fluidity. A pleasure to scroll through the pictures on any given day.
9. Fast Everything!
Coming from the turtly e61i and reading about how slow the Nokia N95 and the Nokia N95 8GB are, I wondered how this lower-priced version would be. Surprisingly it is very fast.
It loads quickly, flips through menu pages quickly, and loads applications quickly. None of that dreadful lag that haunts the e61i. *shudder*
10. That Sensible Time Turner
I’ll admit reading how the N82 runs apps in the background (unlike older models that close automatically when you press the red button) worried me some, since I am lazy with my phone and tend to impatiently press the red button to close apps when they load too slow or I just want to close them. And I hate wasting battery.
That combo is enough to stress even the non-neurotic. Fortunately here is where good design comes into play. If you scroll through your menu, you’ll see a small blue turning circle at the edge of an app if it is still running in the background. So you can just open it, shut it down properly and breathe again.
Conclusion: Mind you, there’s more. But these are the ones that cause me to look upon it tenderly and give that silly smile. There are also minor annoyances that may nag me to blog about them in due course. But for now, I am rather buggered since it is 3.56am and I really should sleep. Never mind. I say that all the time. And if you’re already dribbling drool at the thought of touching that N82 (and you need a phone with a good camera, wifi, and music features), just go buy it already.
Update: Here’s an 11th. The smart predictive text. It remembers any new words I add and displays them first. Even the symbols have a display list of last used symbols for quick access. Writing html on your phone has never been easier! A definite subtle but fabulous usability improvement.
Want more opinions? Check out The Nokia Blog on the cam, The Nokia Blog on the look and feel, and IntoMobile’s review.
Leave a Reply