In part 1 of this review, I focussed on the hardware of the N81 8GB. In the second part of this review I'll be zeroing in on its music capabilities. Given the positioning of the N81 8GB as a music and gaming focussed phone, this is clearly an important area for the phone to do well in.

Search versus Scroll (or why I like the Naviwheel)

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. 

So the addition of the naviwheel (or perhaps it should be called the 'scroll wheel square with funky web 2.0 rounded corners'?) is a good thing as storage space increases. I’ve spoken about the naviwheel issues in part one of this review, and there is a knack to being accurate (much as there is with the scroll pad on the Apple iPod range), but it still seems a little bit haphazard, especially when browsing music. You’ve got to be running around just the right section of the raised pad to make it ‘spin’ and I found that for moving just a couple of lines it was not quite sensitive enough.

I very much doubt that my foibles in how people choose music depending on storage size was the primary concern of Nokia when developing the N81, but it makes me happy that the addition of the naviwheel has significantly enhanced the music experience compared to other Nseries devices. Scroll and search put together make the N81 well suited to music on the move.

I’m also very happy that the automatic playlists are still on board. While 'Most Played Tracks' and 'Recently Played Songs' are useful in their own right, with the 8GB capacity I find myself regularly using 'Recent Additions' both to build my own playlists, but also to jump to the newest tracks and bypass both scrolling and searching. It’s a simple trick, but one that many other popular music players forget.

Controlling the music

The N81 has two ways to control the music that's playing - the first is the regular playback controls using the cursors - play/pause is the center keys, forward and back are left and right, with down as stop (the same on pretty much every device) and, thanks to the raised naviwheel, these are easy to find and press when the device is in your pocket.

That of course assumes you're still in the music app, so Nokia also have a set of global playback keys that will work from any application. Again the four regular controls of play/pause, stop, forward and back, and they can be found just outside the naviwheel even by touch. The problem of course is that with the rest of the key surface being smooth, it's almost a leap of faith when you press down on the surface where you think the key is. There's very little movement (less than a millimetre) and a slight delay from keypress to hearing the result in your headphone. The feedback to the user is not good here, and feels sluggish. Not what you'd expect in a high end smartphone.

Listening to Music 

A few things on actually listening to the music. One of the biggest improvements compared to my current Nseries, the N95, is a physical one. The 3.5mm stereo jack plug has moved from the left side of the unit to top center on the N81; with this small touch the usability of the phone as a media player is greatly improved. The sound quality put out by the N81 is fractionally better than the N95 – at least to my ears. I also think there is an improvement over the previous music focused Nseries - the N91. On the N81 there is a touch more richness to the treble and the bass is a lot crisper. No doubt in due course we’re going to see some spectrographic tests emerge, but to me, there’s no argument to be made that you’re compromising on audio quality in the hardware.

Given that most people's music collection will be at a bitrate of around 128-192kbps (and most purchased music online is at this level), I think we’re at the point where the quality of the MP3, AAC or WMA track has more of an impact than the hardware itself. I've no doubt that, if you punch up to a full WAV file, or a very high bitrate on lossless files then hardware issues may come into play again, and the Hi-fi specialists will be looking for the perfect reproduction, but right now, for 99% of the users of the N81, the music playback is as good as any other digital mainstream music player on the market.

I do wish that there was more granularity to the volume though. It steps from a value of 0 to 10, which is fine if you’re on a basic headset, but having tried it on a number of in-ear models (from my basic Sony headband set right up to a set of custom moulded in-ear monitors) I’m finding it hard to get a volume that’s not too loud and not too quiet. If I have my way it would be at around 3.6. It would also be nice to have a volume limiter in the N81 – with some in-ear headphones, high volumes are painfully loud, and when you turn up the volume for a call, and then the music comes back on automatically, I did think ‘yowsers, AC/DC are loud’ on a few occasions...

The big part of the audio chain that the user can influence is of course the headphones used. The N81 retail package comes with a standard set of bud headphones, and they're good, if not stunning. While they won't set the world alight, neither would you throw them away at the first opportunity.

Nokia's Bluetooth headsets work well with the A2DP profile - and in a head to head with the same music file on the N95, there's less drop out and clipping on the audio - I wonder if there's been an increase in the bandwidth given to stereo Bluetooth, or if there's a more efficient encoding of the audio stream in the handset. Whatever's been done, it's an improvement on other Nseries devices.

Getting Music on the Phone 

Of course one of the big factors in making any modern music device easy to use is how you get your music collection onto the device, and let’s be honest here, Apple have that sorted, and Nokia still aren’t there yet. You’ve got three main ways to manage this with the N81. Nokia’s Music Manager software for the PC; attaching the N81 as a ‘Media Device’ over USB (Windows Media Transfer Protocol); and attaching it as a generic USB Mass Storage Device.

Let’s start with Nokia’s Music Manger. It’s… cute. It shows a nice list of all your drives on your PC, and also ‘My Collection’ of music that you’ve identified as being on your hard drive. I started by pointing this at the folder on my PC with my MP3 collection, and it collated them into the view. And then I started to hunt for some Deep Purple to copy over, and the fun started.

There’s no find function.

I’ve got almost 12 days of solid music, almost 4,500 tracks, and I’ve got to scroll through them to find out which ones I want to put onto the N81? Yikes, that’s painful. While you can click on the top index tabs to sort the list by one column on an alphabetical basis, it’s still a long winded and non-friendly way of doing it. A simple search box in the corner, like pretty much any other music player on my computer would have made this a lot easier. Comparing this to the ease of finding the music on the N81 and you can guess why I’m a touch annoyed.

But once I’ve tracked down the music, it’s a simple matter to tick it, and then either hunt down some more, or hit the transfer button to move it from the PC to the N81 – a nice touch here is to offer to transcode to a more efficient file format, but in the interests of speed I leave my files as is. And that speed is another consideration; the data transfer rate on the N81 is sloooooowwwww. Much slower than transferring the same files to (and here’s that word again) the iPod mini.

As I said, you have some alternatives – switching the N81 into a “Media Player” at the point it connects over USB allows both Microsoft’s Windows Media Player software and the ever popular WinAmp (now from AOL) to see the N81 as a media device; this allows you to bypass Nokia’s software and use the other software as an alternative. Given that many people will be using those to manage the music collection on their computers, this is a smart move (and in some cases required – only Windows Media provides a suitable DRM solution to power the Nokia Music Store, of which more in the next part of this review). Going into the intricacies of either of these is beyond the review. What I will say is that I am glad to see that Nokia has both provided these options.

Summing Up The Noise

As a music device, the Nokia N81 8GB is up there with the best of them. It is a compromise device, but the integration of hardware keys for the main playback functions, alongside the naviwheel functionality, makes moving around your collection easy and quick.

It’s fair to say that the N81 wins out as a music phone because of the strengths of the on-device playback, and in spite of the problems and awkwardness of the various desktop-based transfer solutions. While it might be an area that many manufacturers are trying to solve, Nokia have had many attempts at this and I still feel it comes up short.

But the decision comes down to this. Does the N81 8GB carry a good subset of my music, so that I can grab it and find something on it when I head out the door? Simple answer. Yes.

Ewan Spence, November 2007

In the next part I'll take a look at the rest of the multimedia features on the device, from watching video, listening to the radio, to capturing video and pictures and doing all the requisite Web 2.0 things with them.