[Review] Nokia N79 , Slimmest N-Series phone

it’s not just a phone. The Nokia N79 is a technology powerhouse packed into a colourful offering, with a combination of a music player, FM radio, mobile Internet device, digital camera, GPS device, office-on-the-go, and a whole lot more. With the additional power-saving features enabled by S60 3rd Edition FP2, its 1200 mAh battery lasts well over a day–sometimes even 2 days–in use.

Nokia Claims that, this New Nokia N79 is the smallest, slimmest N-Series phone that it has ever released.

Pros: Novel design with Xpress-On covers, Excellent browser, Decent price, An all in one device worth your bucks!

Cons: No smart dialing, Doesn’t charge off USB (But the same is provided in N85), Not the best camera performance, Zooming in on a photo takes ages , No dedicated 3D graphics accelerator
In the box, you find …… a 4GB microSD + DC Charger + two bonus smart covers for the rear (automatically change the active theme of your Nokia N79 – There are tiny connectors on the back panels allow the phone to switch themes to match the cover color….. More on Smart covers (read further)) + A microUSB cable

Peripheral Design

The top of the front panel: 2.4″ display and the keypad, earpiece, video-call camera and ambient light sensor with Nokia logo drawn sideways on the right side.

The microSD card slot and the USB port share a seat on the left side

Nokia N79’s right side hosts the stereo speakers, the volume rocker and the dedicated camera key.

Tiny connectors on the back panels allow the phone to switch themes to match the cover color

The back panel of Nokia N79 has a neat and simple styling although the plastic is a little too glossy for our taste. The 5 megapixel camera lens is here under a small active cover. It is also complimented by a dual-LED flash. If you remove the back panel you will notice the four tiny connectors the phone uses to change the theme accordingly.

It hosts a 1200 mAh BL-6F Li-Ion battery with 5 hours and 30 minutes of talk time and 370 hours of stand-by.Xpress-On Smart Covers

The Nokia N79 comes with Xpress-on smart covers that are available in five cool colors: Light Sea Blue, Espresso Brown, Olive Green, White and Coral Red. A combination of three of these comes with each Nokia N79. The cool thing about these back covers is that if you change the back cover to say, a red one, then, even your background of the Screen would change to a red. This theme switching with different back covers is almost instantaneous

User Interface & software

Nokia N79 runs on Symbian 9.3 with Series60 3rd Edition user interface and feature Pack 2 preinstalled. The layout is quite familiar with status icons appearing on the top of the screen and soft key labels at the bottom. The active standby screen is a nice and convenient way of bringing shortcuts to all favorite applications to your home screen. You can even assign shortcuts to websites of your choice for quicker access.

The screen can be organized in either vertical or horizontal tabs.

With Nokia N79 users have a choice between four different menu view modes. The first two are the well known 4 x 3 grid and a simple list. The other two available modes are the 3D V-shape and Horseshoe layouts. They do look a lot better but working with them does take time getting used to.

Camera & Video

* There is a dedicated camera key making it easier for the user to use all the features and functions. The N79 mobile phone also comes with a slide cover not only for protection but for camera activation.

The Nokia N79 mobile phone comes equipped with a built-in 5 mega-pixel camera (2584 x 1938 pixels) which features so many fantastic imaging functions which include, CMOS sensor, Carl Zeiss optics, Tessar Lens, an amazing 20x digital zoom, auto-focus with 2 stage capture key, Duel LED flash and flash modes that can be, On, Off, Automatic or with Red-Eye reduction.

* Features Scene Modes; automatic, manual, close up, portrait, landscape, sport, night portrait and night.
* Light sensitivity Modes; high, medium, low and automatic, Colour tone Modes; normal, sepia, black & white, vivid and negative.

Once you have snapped your photo you can edit it using the Photo editor software provided with the Nokia N96. If you want to share it with friends and family simple take advantage of the Nokia Xpress share and transfer programs provided. Viewing photos is easy with the rotating gallery Navi wheel support.

Now to the video capture mode on the Nokia N79 mobile phone. The main camera will record videos in VGA up to 640 x 480 pixels and up to 30/fps with an 8x digital video zoom.

The front camera features a 2x digital zoom. The video camera records in MP4, 3GP, H.263 & H.264 file formats. Again, there is a vast selection of video features enabling the user to capture video footage in the best way possible. The user can optimise the footage by adjusting the Scene modes, Colour tone modes and Video white balance modes settings.

Music Player

The N79 mobile phone comes equipped with a digital music player that supports popular music formats such as, MP3, WMA, AAC, eAAC & eAAC+ formats. There are dedicated volume keys allowing the user to control the 3D sound effect stereo speakers with ease.

* features a built-in FM stereo radio with RDS support and visual radio support.
* The music player also offers it users Playlists, Equaliser, Selection by artist, Album & Genre, Album graphics display and Skins.
* Synchronising music with Windows Media Player along with Nokia music Manager, Store support and Podcasting support is also offered.

It comes packaged with a 4 GB microSD memory card that makes it possible to store around 3,000 songs, approximately 2,500 pictures and up to four hours of DVD-quality video clips that can be organized by albums or tags and uploaded directly to Share on Ovi or third party services.

Internet & Connectivity

There are a number of technologies provided on the N79 handset which include, GPRS, EDGE, HSDPA and TCP/IP support, they are all there to provide the user with a speedy service, great capabilities and a superb quality of service. The N79 mobile phone operates on a Quad-band network which covers GSM 850/900/1800/1900 & EGSM 900 and the handset will automatically switch between the GSM bands to find the best available network(roaming to us ordinary folk!).

* The user can surf the net with ease as the N79 mobile phone uses HTML/XHTML web browsers with the inclusion of Nokia web browser for Mini Map.
* The user can shop on-line or even stay in touch with friends with sites such as, Facebook, MySpace and Bebo anytime they please or just to stay up to speed with all the latest news and information.
* Connecting to other devices is easy with Bluetooth® 2.0, Micro-USB, High-Speed USB 2.0 and 3.5mm AV connectors all supported.

A Friendster widget will also be made available for the Nokia N79 via the WidSets service. This will allow people to browse Friendster friends’ profiles, view and post shoutouts, upload pictures taken with their handset, and browse their own and friends’ photo albums. All this enables more effective communication with friends while away from a computer using the Nokia N79. New users can even register for Friendster directly on their device via a link to Friendster’s mobile site (m.friendster.com), create an account, and instantly begin participating in the Friendster global community.

PhoneBook & Contact Management

The phonebook of Nokia N79 has quite extensive functionality. The contacts can be ordered by first or last name and can be searched by gradual typing of any of them .There are limitless choices of fields to add when editing a contact. You may group your contacts and give each group a specific ringtone.

Application Tools

Now the Nokia N79 mobile comes with a vast array of applications to make life easier for its user. Some of which include; Flash Lite 3.0, Quickoffice:trade; (Quickword, Quickpoint, Quicksheet), Adobe Reader:reg;, Zip Manager, Nokia Maps®, Nokia Web Browser – Mini Map to name only a few of these amazing features.

Miscellany

* You can also adjust the standby background to show a slide show of your photos instead of a single static image.

On a closing note…

When compared to N85 (Rs. 23,600) which is a slider and costlier than N79 (Rs. 19,600), the latter offers you the best in its candybar form. Definitely N Series are known to be feature-rich, and N79 is absolutely no exception.

N79 fits in well as a social butterfly’s pick in the NSeries lineup.