The Nokia N82 on a Belated Pedestal

Published by Steve Litchfield at 14:13 UTC, April 11th 2009

Tucked away in my office for days on end, exploring the frontiers of technology, at least in the smartphone world, it's exciting to tinker with the latest touchscreen smartphone, be it Nokia 5800 or N97 or Samsung Omnia HD. In such circumstances, having a phone throw up weird errors or having to rebuild the OS isn't a big problem and is, after a fashion, kind of fun. Life on the bleeding edge, as it were.

But heading out into the 'real world', as I've been doing for the past week, a world inhabited by parents and cousins and grandchildren (not mine), it's best to fall back on hardware and software that's going to be 100% reliable. In every respect.

Which is why I headed off with the trusty Nokia N82. I know, I know, I was a bit dismissive of the N82's styling when it first appeared, but as time has gone on the phone has become more and more appealing. So a bit of a U-turn from yours truly, but:

At the time I think we all thought that Nokia's OMAP2-based graphics acceleration was going to be standard in all following phones, or maybe improved upon.
At the time we all thought that Xenon flash was going to be retained for at least some future models.
At the time we expected that the protective lens shutter would also be standard.
And at the time the VGA video recording, neatly focussed for action within a metre or two, was also expected to continue, as it had on the N95 and N95 8GB (plus E90) before it.
And, as such, there was no reason to lift the N82 up onto a pedestal, since future devices would obviously exceed it.

Curiously, the machinations of Nokia's platform plans has meant that the likes of the N95 and N82 haven't been equalled since, with the N79, N85 and N96, plus the 5800 XpressMusic, all lacking in most of these ways. No graphics acceleration (which makes a big difference when playing back video and some games), no Xenon flash (the only other smartphone with this is the [also S60-powered] Samsung G810, which is a let down in other areas), the N96 and 5800 both lack any kind of lens protection, and all bar the 5800 have had their video recording crippled by being focussed on infinity.

To all of which, all I've got to say is 'Gah!'. At AAS, we often get accused of being Nokia fanboys, but the truth is that we speak our minds and that we divulge honest opinions, with this rant being one of them(!)

And so it was that I headed into the British spring (rain, cloud, cold, gloomy/cold public buildings) with the N82. And, to be honest, there isn't another phone/smartphone in the world that could have done everything I did with it during the week.

• I took over a hundred photos, all in 'challenging' conditions. When you're trying to capture ad-hoc moments in the life of an extended family (such as here when distant-living cousins cane together to play), you've got to be extremely quick (shot set up times often need to be less than 3 seconds) and you've got to take whatever conditions you get given. In this case, cloudy gloom outdoors and indoor scenes where the lights often needed to be on. Under these circumstances, the N82's Xenon flash was invaluable - when you've tried Xenon you really can't go back - it freezes action and illuminates like nothing else on earth. The way the N82's camera launches when the shutter slide is opened also makes for a quick experience (though I know the N78 and N85 also match this).
   
  
  A typical snap from the trip. This is inside a railway museum, with the reflections off the foreground raincoat showing how dark it really was. And yet the illumination is very bright with Xenon flash. A dual LED flash would have produced much patchier illumination and would also have shown blurring where the children were moving.
   
• When there's no choice of weather conditions, it's sometimes needed to use your smartphone in the rain. As I've documented before, the N82 seems better than most smartphones at surviving abuse and (here) even light rain. The steam train photo below was taken in light drizzle, for example. No worries about damage to the screen or fascia.
   
  
   
• Back in the family living room, it was the work of 10 seconds to plug the TV out lead into the N82 and give everybody a slide and movie show on the communal 40" TV screen. I don't think everybody could believe that all the images and videos were taken on a phone, though of course you can tell if you know what to look for. Certainly in 'good enough' territory though. The N79, N85 and N96 would have produced blurrier videos on the whole and wouldn't have been half as slick when streaming media through the TV out cable.
   
  

  

   
• We visited a fair number of venues in attempts to keep the children occupied and Nokia Maps came into its own - having a full real time, voice-guided navigation system on your phone and ready for action in seconds is a huge boon. I also had access to my nephew's TomTom sat-nav unit in the car and we tried the two systems in parallel much of the time. Interestingly, despite the extra (12?) receiver capability, the TomTom cut out several times in terms of the shown route, while the N82 and Nokia Maps allowed me to press on regardless, with no downtime, even when going under bridges or in tree-lined areas - the N82's GPS antenna really is well positioned (especially compared to the travesty that is the positioning on the N95 and N95 8GB). Yes, I know Nokia's online Maps search servers are currently broken for UK (seven character) postcodes, so I had to work around that, but even so the tool did the job for me.
   
• At night, to get to sleep, and first thing in the mornings, I amused myself by catching up with audio podcasts, streamed over A2DP to my Bluetooth wireless headset. I guess this bit is just showing off to iPhone readers(!) and I could equally well have used a 3.5mm wired headset, but going 'wireless' in this area is still pretty cool and almost every Symbian OS-powered phone now has A2DP so why not use it?
   
• One family member wanted a cropped version of one of my photos in a hurry (on their phone) and using the N82's built-in image editing it was again the work of a few seconds to crop the picture as needed and then fire it off via Bluetooth. Under a minute elapsed from the ten year old asking and the crop arriving on their device. Not wishing to bash the iPhone yet again, but this still has no basic image editing facilities and no Bluetooth file/object transfer and the same applies to many other popular touchscreen phones.
  

I'm not blind to the N82's weaknesses, of course. In this case, the smallish and relatively dim screen, which is a limitation when trying to catch up with news in Web and when trying to show off media on-device. I'm not counting the keypad as a weakness anymore, note, because I've found that it's actually more tactile than many other phone keypads and as a result I get less miskeys.

Stability is also a factor when dealing with 'classics' like the N82, with their firmware now (e.g. at v31) extremely mature and crashes almost unheard of. In comparison, my S60 5th Edition-powered 5800 has been locking up several times a day (I know, I know, I push it quite hard) and this was another factor in my switching back to the N82 until Nokia get round to fixing the 5800 up a little more.

Am I right to put the N82 (belatedly) up on a pedestal? Comments welcome.

Steve Litchfield, All About Symbian, 11 April 2009

Categories: Comment, Hardware
Platforms: General, S60 3rd Edition

Quote:

Originally Posted by Pawlee if the device has to be 17mm thick for a xenon flash i REALLY do not mind it bein 17mm thick...

It doesn't. 6220 Classic is 15,2mm and I'm sure they would be able to get it below 14mm if they tried, and still give the phone a decent 5mp camera.

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