ThinkPad X200 Tablet Save Extra 5%
- Average user rating: 3.5 stars out of 13 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
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1 out of 1 people found this review helpful
2.0 stars
"Had the phone for over a year now and can say save your money or buy another model."
Pros: Smartphone so you can add applications, good mix of default features, VOIP, Web chats, 3mpix Camera, podcasting capability, internet access and Web mail
Cons: Battery life terrible, can be very slow when switching between applications, crashes often, low memory warning when browsing the Web, can't get full functionality in the US
Summary: I love Nokia and was thrilled to get this phone but I have to confess if I could travel back in time, I wouldn't have got the N80. First off, if you live in the US, the only advice I can offer is save your money or buy a later model. I live in the US and can't get full functionality from any of the US based carriers because they only support full functionality for their store-branded phones, i.e. phones you buy at their store. This means setting up basic things like email on the phone was a nightmare. Luckily Google makes a handy Gmail application that I was able to install and that works great. Otherwise I would have been SOL. And forget about the other features like video calling and video messaging. I've had this phone with both AT&T and T-Mobile and neither supports this feature. And perhaps I've been doing something wrong but I can't get audio or video streaming to work so I can't listen to/watch the BBC.
That being said, the Nokia N80 is an amazing phone. At least it would be if you could do everything the phone promises to do. It's a smartphone so you can add applications, games, etc. but it's incredibly slow when running more than one application (say if you have the calendar open and you try to read and SMS). I counted over ten seconds to open up an SMS, from the moment I pressed the "Show" button. The Web broswer is cool but it gives an "insufficient memory" warning and crashes constantly. About 50% of the time I try to do some serious Web brosing (not counting reading Gmail or RSS feeds, which work great) the thing crashes.
And sometimes the keys just freeze up and I have to open the back and take out the battery just so I can restart the phone. Speaking of the battery, battery life is terrible. I might not have done the whole drain-and-recharge thing correctly the first time, I don't know, but the battery seldom goes a full day without dying, even if I don't use make any calls or use the phone at all.
The camera is great if you intend to only take pictures outdoors in perfect weather. The pictures are great if it's sunny and the sky is clear. Attempting to take pictures indoors, even with ample light, in cloudy conditions, or at night is a frustrating and disappointing experience. The picture quality is simply terrible in any conditions other than outside on a clear and sunny day.
The voice recognition feature is pretty cool, but only about 30% of the time does it recognize the names I say. Unlike older voice recognition phones, the N80 does not give you the option of recording your own voice recognition tag for each contact. Instead, it attempts to guess the pronunciation from the spelling. Now I have a lot of contacts who have non-European/Anglo names or names that are not pronounced the way they are spelled so about two-thirds of the time it doesn't recognize the name. Same goes for the profiles and even some of the applications, all of which can be activated using the voice-recognition feature. When I say "Pager" to turn on the Pager profile, it works but for some reason, it can't recognize "Meeting," "Silent," or "General."
Finally, this seems to be the phone Nokia forgot. I visit the Nokia Web site to check for updates and they always have cool stuff (like maps) for all their other smartphone models, but never anything for the N80. The Europe sites all have the same great stuff for their N80 users, but I guess Nokia didn't sell enough of them in the US to merit updates.
So all in all, I hate to write a negative review of a phone I spent $500 on, but after almost 2 years of having this phone, I have to admit I kinda feel like a sucker. The US carriers don't support all the phone's functions, the manufacturer doesn't make all its software and applications available for the phone if you live in the US, and on top of that, the phone itself has some serious flaws: weak battery life, unstable operating system that freezes or crashes constantly, insufficient memory to browse the web for longer than a couple of minutes at a time, unreliable voice-recognition feature.
Thankfully, third-party developers like Google and a host of others have produced games and other applications for the N80's operating system that seem to work. Google Maps, Google Search, Youtube, and Google Mail are all available in mobile versions for the N80. Despite that, though, I feel like I'm only getting about 40% functionality out of my phone.
My advice: research another Nokia model because the N80 is a bust.
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