Nokia N80

A phone bursting at the seams with extras; possibly too many for its own good.

If you took all the customer requests from every mobile phone survey and added them to a phone, the result would be the N80. It will present you with features that you wouldn’t think you’d ever need, like video editing.

It’s all contained in a suave and ergonomic package, the back of which is rounded to your palm with edges that slope inwards, making it feel small yet giving the front facia more surface area to accommodate a large screen. Although the slide-out keys are a bit on the small side, they are easy to dart around thanks to an indentation that helps you keep your bearings.

Starting with the connectivity side of things; Bluetooth is (not surprisingly) included. More surprisingly, so are both infra-red and Wi-Fi, in a tip of the hat to backward and forward compatibility. A VGA camera is included in the front of the N80 for video calls, but the three megapixel camera in the back, which sports an LED-based flash and switchable macro and telephoto focus settings, is more impressive -- although it lacks a lens cover.

The unit ships with an upgradeable 128MB Mini SD card. MP3s are played back through a rudimentary player, Quickoffice is included and the phone even has a voice synthesizer which reads out names in your contact list when they call. All the features are listed in the 126 page manual, which starts talking about making calls at about half way through.

Because of all this, the phone’s structure is complex and takes quite a lot of getting used to. The layered main menu system is supplemented by six shortcut icons to the most commonly used features on the home screen. Below these icons your schedule, memos, to do list and other entries from the phone’s calendar are displayed. In addition to these options, there’s a shortcut button next to the menu button, from which you then use the 5-way rocker key to select one of the customisable options. The soft keys can be customised too.

You’ll always find more than one way to accomplish a task, which although flexible, can sometimes leave you scratching your head wondering how to get to an option. The address book is present in both the root menu and shortcuts, along with being potentially present in the soft key and custom shortcut menu. Being this spoiled for choice can feel overwhelming, but by the time you’ve laid the phone out the way you like it, you will have gotten used to it and it will feel intuitive.

The only downside is that the phone is very slow to respond. It’s a recent Nokia trait, and one present in almost every Symbian based phone we’ve seen from Nokia recently. The problem feels more pronounced with the N80 though. Older phones seemed to speed up commonly used functions by caching them, whereas the N80 makes you wait a second or more before it responds to any command regardless of use.

We loved being able to select multiple SMS recipients from the address book. We loved the feel of the keys, the PC synchronisation software and the mountain of features. It’s just a little overwhelming and slow, which unfortunately steepens the learning curve.