Parm’s Place

I’ve got a new phone!

Picked up the Nokia N80 yesterday, and have had a lot of fun playing with it so far.

I’ve upgraded to this from my previous phone, a Sony Ericsson W800i. Although the W800i was a very cool looking phone, it wasn’t much more than that.

The N80 on the other hand does just about everything other than cook my breakfast for me!

At first the phone felt a bit bulky and heavy, but you get accustomed to it and it’s forgotten before you know it.
The phone looks very smart, silver and black with a lot of lovely blue lighting. It features a sliding panel, which I’ve always enjoyed using on phones. Users of the old Nokia 8850 will find the slide very familiar.

I found the menu system somewhat…complicated, to begin with. Having not used a Nokia phone for quite some time, I couldn’t tell my left from my right, and with the amount of features this thing has, it’s enough for anybody to get lost.

The PC Suite software is rather nice, a vast improvement over the Sony Ericsson software I used to use.
Synching all my date from my Outlook to my phone was a doddle, I had all my contacts, calender, notes etc restored in seconds.

Although I’ve only had it for a day, I’ve had a play with some of the features and here are my highlights:
Music Player - Very good! Easy to add music from PC and easy to catalogue your music in the Media Library.
Gallery - The whole imaging system on this phone is great, with a 3 mega pixel camera behind it, it’s one of the phones key features.
LifeBlog - Here’s a handy little app thats included with the phone. Lets you Blog all your data straight to your web blog if you have one. You may have noticed I have one, so I’ll be Blogging straight from my phone to my site before you know it!
WLAN - Wireless LAN, very straight forward setup, I was able to connect to my home network with ease and browse the web on my phone using my broadband connection. The browser on the phone is great with some really useful tools to make the whole browsing process on a screen of this size all the more pleasant.
The Screen - Probably the best screen I’ve seen on a mobile phone of this size yet. It’s vibrant and crisp, very pleasing on the eye.

Now I’m sure there’s a lot of other cool features, but I haven’t got that far yet! hehe

There are however a few downsides:
Size - You do get used to it, but it is slightly bigger and heavier than I’d hoped.
Headphones - The set that bundle with the phone are pretty much useless. Not anywhere near the quality of the in ear headphones I had supplied with the Sony Ericsson W800i.
USB Charging - None existant, the phone won’t charge via your USB ports.
Software - As the phone uses the new Symbian OS, very few applications are available for it. Very few being an understatement. This of course is only a temporary problem as we should be inundated with compatible apps before you know it.

Feel free to take a look at some more photos of the phone on my Flickr Gallery
Apologies for the comparison pictures of the N80 and the W800i, they were taken via my webcam which as you can see…sucks!