Nokia N85 : Complete review

If you are a gadget geek, diwali has come just at the right time. Use the festival excuse to try out a cool gadget getting launched this festive season. The nokia N85 which is billed as the successor to the nokia’s extremely popular N95 series and the more recent N81 is definitely going to be one of the most talked products of the first two quarters of 2009.

So, what is there in it for the average user-You and Me?

The N85 is way compact and sleeker when compared to bulky almost brick-like N95 phones. Although there isn’t a quantum leap in terms of design and ergonomics when compared to its predecessors, the N85 feels better in the hand and is also less edgy with every corner and edge rounded. One passing comment on the designer conception, well it looks like there isn’t going to be anything drastically new coming out of Nokia as long as the current designs sell well. The philosophy seems to be whatever design sells has to be the correct one.

The screen of N85 is identical in size to the original N95 (2.6’’) but bases off the AM-OLED technology. This helps to notch down the power consumption and gives a better looking palette. The high refresh rate makes N-Gage gaming more engaging and interesting and is a definite improvement over N95

The block of controls is remarkable for the availability of numerous dedicated media buttons which are rendered active only when you are working with the player – rewinding, play, pause, and similar features also found with Nokia N81 or N96. The only difference is that the dedicated buttons of N85 are totally flat and remain unseen until their markings are backlit in the active state. A Navi Wheel is available, remaining active in all menus and lists. A slight disappointment here is that it doesn’t carry out any special functions like a message or a call reminder, a feature still available on some older Nokia models.

The set of buttons residing on the moving part of the slider complement the controls surrounding the navigation button. The button markings change automatically according to the current mode: in the player mode, a total of four rewinding / play / pause / switch track buttons are active; in gaming, only the two central buttons can be used as controls; in the gallery, these buttons serve as zoom in and zoom out controls. The idea is close to what we see in some Motorola models, especially E8. The numerical keyboard is made from a solid piece of plastic; the buttons are very flat, and pose no practical inconvenience. The large size of the buttons eliminates the possibility of stray keystrokes. The numerical keys are larger than on N96.

Nokia N85 is coming with a new generation BL-5K 1200 mAh battery and has the longest playback cycle among all Nokia smartphones, even beating N78. The USB 2.0 wire data transfer speed reaches 4 Mbytes per second. The Mass Storage mode is fully supported; the user is free to choose in what way the handset will be used upon establishing a phone-to-PC cable connection: Mass Storage, PC Suite, Image Print, Media player. As long as the phone stays connected to the PC, the battery is being recharged. N85 is the company’s first smartphone sporting such a possibility.

GPS has become almost synonymous with a Nokia handsets and with Nokia Maps 2.0, the application interface has become intuitive, informative and user friendly. A major addition is the dedicated pedestrian mode (Walk) which is an exclusive feature as stated by the company representatives. Pedestrian-friendly features include special voice reminders, step-by-step visual hints (e.g. the ‘footprints’); the onboard compass helps to indicate the wanted direction. The maps are incredibly detailed, displaying anything from highways to walking paths in a park. The compass needs calibration prior to starting work. The integrated accelerometer is what allowed for adding such a feature.

The Nokia N85 features a Carl Zeiss lensed camera rated at 5 mega pixels. The auto focus and dual LED flash assist you in taking the best pictures possible no matter the conditions and you can also record video at 30fps (frames per second) .The multimedia player interface is pretty standard, showing no difference from Nokia N96 or N78. N85 works equally fine as a multimedia player, a digital cam or a gaming console.

A heartening thing for all you gaming freaks out there is that the gadget comes with a variety of preinstalled games. Since Nokia N85 is marketed as a gaming Smartphone, it comes with ten games preinstalled on it, one of them being a fully licensed copy and the rest – demos. The high quality, large OLED screen provides for maximum comfort during gaming sessions.

The onboard Wi-Fi unit is served by a friendly WLAN Wizard which helps you to configure a web connection in no time despite the obvious limitation that it does not have a lot of options. Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR is available, supporting all the common profiles

Although there aren’t any breakthrough technological features, the pricing at Rs 27,299 makes this a good buy for the range of features it offers.