Image courtesy of Nokia

These days, most cellphones have built-in cameras, most being VGA-quality. As we head into the digital age, the quality of these cameras have been increasing and Nokia may have what you’re looking for. The Nokia N80 has a built-in 3 megapixel camera, and a VGA-quality camera on the front for easy video conferencing. Read on to see the verdict.

Wait, video conferencing? You heard right, the only problem is no carrier in North America supports it. Being an unlocked phone, chances are this phone will never be seen in carrier stores until a faster network is rolled out, but I digress. The 3 megapixel camera is something worth paying the money for.

Quality of the 3 MP camera was generally great, but it went downhill from there, with paltry quality in low-light, most of your photos will want to be in a well-lit environment or outside in the sun. The camera sports a focus slider allowing you to switch from landscape to close up macro mode at the slide of a finger. The camera on the front is still VGA quality and the quality is worsened also by low-light.

Moving on to the navigation side of things, the N80 is a slider phone, which means it looks like a typical candy-bar style phone, but isn’t. Slide up the phone and presto! The keypad is there at your service, keys were small, yet still usable for day-to-day use. The beatiful 2.2-inch screen was sharp, vivid in color, and not too bad for web browsing (more on this later).

In terms of functionality and connectivity, the Nokia N80 doesn’t stop there, in addition to Bluetooth technology, the phone also takes advantage of 802.11g wireless LAN capabilities for fast Web surfing (this phone does it all) and email. Now, this is a smartphone which means you can do all of your email, calendaring, and document viewing straight on the phone. How’s that for portability?

Wireless connectivity was excellent and couldn’t have been better, with great wireless LAN reception to our access point.

The N80 also sports a music player and FM radio. The only downside to the FM radio was that the headphone attachment actually has the radio antenna built into it. Regardless of whether you want to listen to the radio using the speakerphone or not, the attachment had to be plugged in. On the flip side, sound quality of music was great and is very easy to use.

Performance was so-so, switching between applications was quite sluggish. Pressing the camera button on the side of the device took a while for the phone to realize that you wanted to take a picture. Telling the phone to go to the main menu, took a bit of time as well.

Without a carrier supporting this device, it is quite expensive, running at steep $500-600 USD, this phone is for the power-user or multimedia addict.

One more thing, call quality was outstanding, in my local area, it sounded like the person I was talking to, was right next to me. It was really that good. You can get 3 hours of talk time and up to 8 days of standby time using this phone, in our testing, we found that the battery life was decent, but no deal-clincher.

Included with the Nokia N80 is an AC adapter, stereo earbuds, a USB PC connectivity cable, a sexy metal wrist band, a nice screen cleaning cloth, and last but not least, a MiniSD card at a disappointing 128MB. If this is a multimedia phone, at least bundle it with a bigger memory card.

Overall, this phone isn’t for the budget shopper or even the fashion-obsessed, I can generally recommend this to power users and people who can spend the $500-600 for the Nokia N80.

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Pros

• Great, vivid 2.2 inch screen.
• Excellent 3.0 megapixel camera with the addition of a front-facing VGA camera.
• Outstanding media capabilities.

Cons

• Sluggish performance.
• High cost without carrier support.
• Not the best battery life in town.

Final Verdict

4 out of 5.