Anything Considered

On sunday, I finally got my N82. And I've been thrilled. It's been a good 3-4 years since my last new phone - the mitsubishi model I can't even remember - and at long last, after army, after all that drag, it's here.

I don't know whether it's just the thrill of something new, but I'm very happy with the phone thus far. I got the black, which I think looks a whole lot better, and less plastic, candybar-like. I like that it's well built; I don't have the feeling of handling something that could break at any time. And I quite like the positioning of the buttons as well, with the camera keys and menu key being especially useful. I understand that the small keys have been a complaint for some, but the keypad is pretty responsive and messaging is a cinch.

The main reason why I wanted this phone was for the camera. I had a look at photo shootouts of all the 5mp phones, and the N82 photos impressed me the most. And after a few test shots of my own, I believe I made the right choice. For a camera phone, the flash is powerful. I had a fully lit shot of my room at night with no lights on. The autofocus works pretty well as well. And unlike the frustrating camera software interface in the K850i, the N82's is intuitive and easy to use. My only complaint is that there is no way to disable the capture tone.

On the software end of things, which is awfully important for such a phone, I felt it was rather troublesome to have to insert a picture in WMP for every song to be transferred, even if album art was visible in WMP. It's a sync-ing problem I suppose, but not one that should be present in a phone of this calibre.

Also, I found the Nokia-Flickr uploader impossible to set up. I began with updating Share Online to version 3.0, which happens to be impossible to uninstall without a hard reset. This led to Share Online self-exiting on the phone whenever I choose to 'update services'. Following the troubleshoot information on the net, I deleted all present accounts under Share Online, to have the problem causing config automatically downloaded from Nokia when I tried to update services. The one and only time I managed to get a proper connect to Flickr through the phone, authentication failed. And mind, I tried with both the Yahoo Flickr password as well as the apparent special Nokia password for Flickr accounts.

Yet in the midst of this problem, another advantage of the N82 shone. The up-to-date Symbian S60 3.1 meant that I had a wide variety of third-party applications to draw from, and Shozu, which I managed to set up in barely 5 minutes, thus easily replaced Share Online 3.0 as the primary upload means for me. The option to 'show transfer data' in Shozu is also a big plus, as it enables me to track the progress of uploads/downloads, and see what went wrong if anything did.

On a whole I'm very pleased with the phone. I haven't had to reset except for the odd crashes during my troubleshooting with Share Online, and the battery power even with camera and WLAN usage is amazing so far.