Thread: Nokia N82 Mobile Phone

FINALLY, A CAMERA PHO E THAT GETS the camera part right! Thanks to the Nokia N82's excellent xenon flash, I'm genuinely comfortable using it to replace my digital camera, and even my camcorder in a pinch. I know, it's crazy, since cell-phone cameras are typically subpar at best. Even better, beyond the N82's best-in-class camera, this is one capable smartphone that's certainly worthy of our Editors' Choice award. A candybar-style handset, the N82 sports a standard numeric keyboard and a relatively large 2.4-inch display, which could be brighter but at least is sharp and clear. At almost 4 ounces, it's light for a smartphone as powerful as this. Mea¬suring 4.4 by 2 by 0 .7 inches, it's not huge, either.

On the back of the phone, there's a 5MP camera with a Carl Zeiss lens and true auto focus (but no optical zoom), protected by a lens cover. The N82's microSD card slot worked well with my 8GB SanDisk card. In addition, I was extremely impressed with the N82's video-recording mode, which is the best I've ever seen on a phone, bar none. It takes smooth, clear 640-by-480-pixel videos, up to an hour long, at 28 frames per second. The N82's music player handles AAC, MP3, and WMA files, including purchased WMA and iTunes Plus (but not purchased protected iTunes files.). Battery life, at more than 10 hours of talk time (with Wi-Fi turned off), is long enough for pretty much everyone.

A Symbian Series 60 smartphone, the N82 runs a wide range of applications. Nokia finally has the problem licked, and the N82 really flies. The 290-MHz ARMll processor, 109MB of free internal storage, and hardware video acceleration make for an enjoyable experience with third party software. I never got an "out of memory" error during testing.An accelerometer in the N82, much like the one in the Apple iPhone, rotates the screen in the music player, browser, and messaging program.



The N8210cked on to 802.11gWPA2-protected Wi-Fi networks without a problem. Brilliant! You can also download the DeviceScape Wi-Fi client, which lets you establish, using your PC, a list of Wi-Fi hot spots that the phone will automatically be able to access. Then there's GPS with Nokia's Maps program. But the program is slow, and the phone's GPS hardware takes a while to lock on to satellites in congested areas. This awesome handset is not only a top camera phone and videophone, it's also an all-purpose smartphone that can handle almost anything you throw its way. Its collection of top-notch features makes it our Editors' Choice.