The Best imaging phone out there. Review on Nokia N82

I had been using my trusty 6630 for about 2 years before I went in for the N82. Now, there were several reasons as to why I needed a new phone, but the predominant one was imaging as I was just starting my post grad studies in Melbourne, one of the most beautiful places on the planet and I needed to send tons of pics to the folks back at home. I probably could’ve got myself a really good digicam for$500 but I really didn’t want to lug around two gadgets in my pocket(and a laptop in my backpack). So I sought the best imaging phone out there and since greenbacks are quite hard to come by as a student, I did a lot of research online, and then tested the shortlisted phones first-hand(Telstra shops in Oz have fully functional phones as demo pieces).

Why the N82?

Being a bit of a nerd, I also needed a phone to have an OS(operating system, for tech jargon-challenged philistines) which had a massive range of installable applications. I am a voracious reader so I need the display to be slightly larger than the norm(a paperback=$39 anyone? Hurray for mobipocket reader!). These requirements prompted me to gravitate towards Nokia smartphones as the imaging phones from their stables are presently the best in the market and they have the largest application base. I read up extensively about the different phones and ended up with two choices, the N95 8GB and the N82. Since the N82 has a brilliant Xenon flash, and uses the same hardware as the N95 8GB(hardware-wise much superior to the normal N95).

What’s it got?

The feature set of the N82 is simply amazing. To get into the details of each and every function would require me to have an unrestricted "character/word count" which unfortunately, I don't. I extensively tested the following functions on an(almost) daily basis:

1) The camera: The best that I've seen. Awe-inspiring clarity when it comes to low/no light conditions. Video is high quality @ 640x480 and looks quite wonderful on an SD TV(or even an HDTV). The best thing is that the video frame rate is 30fps, so you can take virtually stutter free videos and have plenty of space to store them(the phone comes bundled with a 2GB card, but an 8GB card isn't expensive at all, and probably a very good investment if you intend to use this as your music player or a camera)

2) The GPS: This really was a life saver! Am not trying to be overly dramatic here, but I had to rely on this quite extensively to get my bearings and plot routes while gallivanting around Melbourne. The really neat fact is that it is free if you use the satellite-only GPS. There are others features like the assisted GPS which is a network dependent service and increases the accuracy of the GPS drastically.

3) The music player: The bundled handsfree, if you're an audiophile, just don't cut it. Just chuck them away if you have a better headset. The phone has a 3.5mm stereo jack, so you're in luck if you have some really neat after-market headphones as you won't need an adapter(which leads to quality losses) to plug in your fav headphones. Initially I had a pair of Creative EP630 which really sounded nice, but I recently took the plunge and bought a pair of Sennheiser HD212 Pro headphones and was simply amazed at the sound. It’s very easy to discern the difference between a 192k bitrate mp3 and a 320kbps mp3. Tried the output to a Bose setup, and as expected, was marvelous.

4) Wi-Fi: The phone has 802.11b/g support and I've used this quite a lot on the different Wi-Fi hotspots and the ease of use is simply brilliant. Do note that it’s quite a pain to enter a huge key if you're using WPA on a secure network. The speed is excellent, and I've tested it on 20mbps wifi networks and it really brought a tear to my eye.

5) 3G: Thankfully, I've had the opportunity to test this phone on 3G networks and the voice clarity is awesome. I also tried video calling and on a proper 3G enabled network, it really is an experience. With 3G comes a mindboggling array of things you can do with this phone like video blogging, image tagging(in conjunction with the GPS) etc. Suffice to say, that when 3G becomes mainstream in India, you'll fall in love with this phone even more.

Final thoughts

There are plenty of nifty features that I am still discovering. Nokia seems to have launched a clear winner and for the time being, there is no offering in the Sony Ericsson line-up which can beat the N82 when the entire package is compared(with the price point, imaging etc). This phone is not very pretty, but it will get all geeks excited with its feature set which eventually is what a gadget is all about.