An exclusive gaming industry community targeted
to, and designed for Professionals, Businesses
and Students in the sectors and industries
of Gaming, New Media and the Web, all closely
related with it's Business and Industry.
A Rich content driven service including articles,
contributed discussion, news, reviews, networking, downloads,
and debate.
We strive to cater for cultural influencers,
technology decision makers, early adopters and business leaders in the gaming industry.
A medium to share your or contribute your ideas,
experiences, questions and point of view or network
with other colleagues here at iVirtua Community.
If you’re looking for plenty of track storage in a smartphone, the N81 is a lower-cost alternative to the N95 and, indeed, Apple’s iPhone. It doesn’t come with the same wealth of functionality as the N95 – no GPS and a lower quality camera than the N95’s five-megapixel job. The design's slick but the plastic casing gives the N81 a cheap feel. And while the controls are cluttered and definitely not as ergonomic as they could be the music player performance is excellent.
Nokia followed up its first 8GB mobile, the music-centric N91, with a second one, the N95 8GB. And now here's a third: the music and gaming geared N81 8GB.
The N81 arrives at the same time as its more luxuriantly-equipped N95 stablemate, bringing a smidgen more choice at a lower price to the high-capacity music-mobile arena.
Nokia is, unsurprisingly, focusing on the N81’s music capabilities. As well as its headline storage capacity, and obligatory dedicated music controls, the N81 8GB is one of the first mobiles to support Nokia's Music Store over-the-air download service.
The N81 comes with a decent helping of 3G and smartphone features, and you can add further Symbian S60 applications. Video calling is present and correct, and there’s a RealPlayer multimedia player for viewing downloaded or PC-transfered video content. This can look great in landscape mode. The camera on the Nokia N81 is, however, a pretty average affair.
The two-megapixel camera has dedicated on-button access and a user interface that’s fairly intuitive. A reasonable set of tweaks can be made to the settings. But the pictures we took were patchy, and sometimes the colour rendition lurched from acceptable to disappointingly poor. The fixed-focus lens can produce decent snaps up to 5 x 7in in size, but close-up quality is limited and images are often soft.
Not, then, Nokia’s best effort by a long way. Video capture is better than average for a cameraphone, recording in VGA quality (640 x 480) at 15 frames per second.
You can upload stills and video with a couple of clicks to Flickr and Vox, and then there's Nokia’s Lifeblog application, which can automatically timeline texts, messages, notes, pics, videos and so on, and allow you to upload them to a blog or transfer them to your PC.
Although there’s no GPS receiver, the N81 does come with Nokia Maps software, which can work with a Bluetooth GPS receiver if you have one. Web surfing is taken care of by the Nokia Web Browser, which works as swiftly as you’d expect on Wi-Fi and fairly smartly too on 3G. The device also supports email with attachments. As usual with Nokia S60 smartphones, you get a good selection of personal information apps, calendar, notes, calculator and PDF reader.
Digg Topic
Tag topic on On del.icio.us
Technorati Search
Post to Slashdot
