Nokia N81 8GB - Initial Impressions

[slitchfield]

So, by happy chance, a couple of Nokia N81s have hit All About Symbian - in the next week you'll have music-angled and gaming-angled reviews from Ewan and Krisse, but first - Steve's first impressions. Others round the net have either slammed the N81 or praised it - read on for Steve's opinion.

Read on in the full article.

[DevilsRejection]

Took you long enough to get my back ;-)

I'm still waiting for a phone which is similar to n95 8gb but has excellent sound quality and versatile sound settings like 10-band equalizer for example...

[MWEB]

Good review Steve, it more or less echoe's everything i have been hearing about the N81.

[slitchfield]

No, Stefan, this wasn't your review unit, this was a brand new production device, straight from the Nokia factory 8-)

[krisse]

The lack of support for the Naviwheel in core apps sounds like they introduced it to the phone far too late in development. The designers possibly didn't have time to get all of the firmware to work with the naviwheel.

However, thanks to the magic of firmware updates they can fix this problem with new firmware which includes better naviwheel support. It's just a question of whether they will bother, which I suspect will depend on how well the N81 sells.

I'm still waiting for a phone which is similar to n95 8gb but has excellent sound quality and versatile sound settings like 10-band equalizer for example...

Have you tried installing third party music applications?

[viipottaja]

IMHO, the only relevant price comparison is with other unlocked, unsubsidized 8GB phones around. There are not many of course. N91 8GB is old and therefore cheap. N95 8GB is new and expensive. SE W960i is, AFAIK, rather expensive too. What else.. iPhone is subsidized, locked, and not a smart phone.. are there others?

Seems like Nokia wouldn't be Nokia if they didn't mess up any gaming related phone in some way.

Besides all it's hardware shortcomings there's the price:
Here they sell the zero gig version on 2y contract for just 60€ less than the N95, yet some 70€ buy an 8gig microsdhc card ... seriously Nokia, wtf?

I realy hope they show some good landscape gaming on the N95, with media keys working in games, when they start the n-gage service. It's like the last hope for a decent gaming phone atm.

There's a detailed review of N81 already in mobile-review.com, also in gsmarena.com. I saw some contradicting reviews however. They say it has 8-band equalizer but as seen on screenshots it's only a 5-band equalizer. According to mobile-review the CPU speed is 332MHz, while gsmarena says it's 369MHz. Which is true?

[hargs48]

The N81 has the 369MHz processor found in all FP1 phones not the Dual CPU @ 332MHz as found in the N93,N93i,N95,N95 8GB & E90...but free RAM has improved to the 20mb odd to 42mb, read all the tech specs here: http://www.forum.nokia.com/devices/N81_8GB

N81 also lacks hardware graphics acceleration. N95 is the king, the N81 is just a range filler!

[viipottaja]

Unregistered,

Nokia does NOT sell ANYTHING on contract, the carrier does. Pricing is the carriers decision as well.

The n81 has only 5-band equalizer which is really bad for music phone but the frequency response diagram of n81 looks good(mobile-review.com). I'd be happy if all s60 3.1......3.x phones have 10-band equalizer so I don't have to buy 3rd party application. The processor of n81 should run at 369 MHz. My nokia 6290 has also the same processor but NsysInfo shows that the processor speed is 192.0 MHz and so do other applications.

[Waynester]

Hi Steve

interesting read my friend
can you clear something up for me?

does the N81 really have as good Audio Quality as the N91 8GB ?
i use this handset all the time along with my N95
i havent found anything as good for listening to MP3`s and that includes ANY ipod

cheers

[slitchfield]

I'm not the world's top audiophile, but I'd rate the N81 8GB's output as good as the N91's....

I think Ewan's been impressed so far, too.