The Nokia N81 8GB - focussing on the music

Published by Steve Litchfield at 9:08 UTC, November 14th 2007

Ewan continues his look at the Nokia N81 8GB by loading up his music collection and trying the device for size in the real world, with a variety of 3.5mm stereo headsets. Here's his N81 8GB review part 2 - it's all about the music.

"I’ve always held Nokia’s S60 music playing in high regard, and this is in part because it is married to something more than just a scroll wheel. The keyboard on a mobile phone, with its textual entry, adds vital functions that music players like the iPod don’t have. Search. It’s always been a close run thing on what is better, having an incredibly fast and accurate scrolling mechanism (the iPod) or being able to zero in with search to an artist, album or track. With music players of between 2GB and 4GB, most people (including myself) have pretty good recall, and know what they’ve loaded up. And if you’re holding back half a Gigabyte or so for images, eBooks and third party applications then that recall is enhanced.

In those circumstances, search is much more useful than scroll. But as capacities increase, there is an increased tendency to leave albums on the device for a long time (and be pleasantly surprised when you come over them again after listening to the new Kenny Rogers Collection that you’ve just transferred). This means that searching becomes a bit more hit and miss ("Have I put Thunderclap Newman on here?", as opposed to "I need 'Something In The Air’ right now!") and scrolling becomes more useful. "

Read on


 

Filed: Home > News > The Nokia N81 8GB - focussing on the music

Platforms: S60 3rd Edition

Categories: Hardware, Editorial Thoughts

News Discussion

mvan
Does it support m4a (itunes plus format) files natively? These are drm free files from the itunes store but apple have changed the tag data so its not a standard m4a format. SE phones support them natively and Nokia appear to support them for mac os users as the Nokia Media transfer app converts the tag data, there are third party convertors for S60 but native support. I use itunes as my Music library as I also have an ipod for home/car use and the 6120c as my smaller capacity travelling music player. Why does Nokia assume that everybody using WXP/Vista uses the Windows Media Player! Please give me a simple media transfer app that supports all known codecs....
jolo
> And then I started to hunt for some Deep Purple to copy over,
> and the fun started.

Did you know that you can click on the various columns in the Music Manager to order them? Click Album, Title, Artist, etc. This eliminates the hunting.
Guess Who
No gapless playback - horse manure.
Unregistered
All Nokias s60 3rd edition mobiles play eAAC+ (.m4a) files without the Itunes drm.

Lark
gibberishy
The sound quality of the N81 is really, really good. It depends so much on headphones. I was using my old Sennheiser PX200s leftover from my N91 days on them, but when they broke I bought a $150US pair of Shure in-ear headphones (E3G). Wow, amazing sound. (By the way, the E3G headphones are for "gaming and music", so a perfect fit for N81...must have come out originally for Sony PSP)
Unregistered
Is there anyway to define between music tracks and ringtones that are mp3. It seem that when going into the music library it will find anything no matter where it is stored on the phone
Sesa
Played Gameboy Advance through emulator beautifully.
I'm hoping it can play PSP games.

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