Much awaited N80 review.

It's been a few days since I got the N80 and it's time to put down my thoughts on the device.

Awesome.

The screen hits you first, because that's what you see first. Crisp, bright, colourful. Waaay better than any of the normal phones you see around you, and certainly no worse than the high-end PDA-phones that you come across. It's a slider phone, the first one that I have had, and nothing to complain about in the slider mechanism. Camera is decent, flash is probably OK too, but certainly not comparable to a "normal" digicam. On the other hand a digicam can't make phone calls.

Tried out the bluetooth to transfer data from my previous phone, worked flawlessly. Also managed to use the Wifi to connect to my laptop and used the phone's browser to wander around the web. That was a nice experience too. Setting up the WLAN took some time, but that was on the laptop. Once set up, the phone recognized it immediately, but refused to browse. Turning off the firewall helped, so it wasn't the phone's fault really. It even managed to find a very weak WLAN signal from someone else's network.

FM radio is great, had a hard time using the inbuilt tuning, but works like a charm when you type in the correct FM frequencies. Looks like the tuning feature is only for fine tuning? Looks like the radio can't be recorded, but I guess that could be fixed by a firmware update - looking forward to that feature.

Music player is great too, limited only by the available space, 128MB mini-SD card doesn't look too big in front of my 60GB iPod. But it's nice to have a music player with some good songs on the memory card for times when the iPod is not around. Sound quality was good to my untrained ears - as long as it sounds OK, I don't care.

The phone's HTML browser is pretty good, you have to see it to understand what I mean. It simulates a little mouse cursor that can be moved around with the directional keys and it highlights any links over which it passes. Works very well.

All said and done, I like this phone. Cost was, of course, astronomical, but I, for one, think it's worth it. For people who just like their phones to be able to make phone calls - this device is absolutely not meant for you, go away.