Ken posts his Nokia N80 Internet Edition review
By Stefan Constantinescu on Thursday, December 28th, 2006 at 11:32 AM PST In Devices
He calls it his impressions, I call it a full blown review. Besides being insane enough to carry 5 mobile phones with him at all times, Ken is taking full advantage of the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) Blogger Relations program by providing in depth critiques of the N73, N80i, and N93. I wish he would complain more instead of pointing out strengths. Every review I read on the net ends up being 90% praising, 10% bashing. If I were to hypothetically start a review site I doubt any company would want to send me their products for testing since I would basically rip everything a new asshole. I don’t do it out of spite, I do it because its the little things that count. Everyone has something they love, but that something more often than not has a defect or two. Buying technology today is a balancing act in the area of compromise and I feel that no one is doing a good enough job of pointing out the faults many of todays devices have. It’s obvious why that is, if you keep on slamming a companies products they aren’t going to send you any more units to test out. Sigh … welcome to the tech industry folks, where favors and networking count more than anything else. Back on topic now, check out Ken’s review of the N80 Internet Edition:
I made comparison calls too. I called via landline, Cingular on the N80i, Verizon (NYSE: VZ) on my Treo, VoIP via the cable connection, and cable via the DSL connection. I called some people using multiple options. I must have had 40 conversations checking out these combinations. I lost count. And the quality? In no case did anyone I was talking to every guess I was using VoIP. The calls were as good a quality, or better, than the mobile carrier network. I spent nearly 20 years working in the vestiges of the former Bell System where the quality mantra was to provide "toll quality voice." Well, given decent WiFi access and throughput, Nokia with Gizmo delivers toll quality VoIP. Period. I wouldn’t hesitate to use it for boardroom conversation with the C-level management team of a Fortune 500 company. It really is that good.
An interesting facet of the presence feature many of us have been talking about lately was also noted. If logged in to GizmoProjec on the PC, and logged in via WiFi on the N80i, both phones ringing, providing a choice of which you’d like to use to answer. I like choice myself, so I appreciated this.
If I noted drawbacks in the Gizmo integration, there were two. First, there is no Gizmo IM client component. Not that IM from a touchpad, no matter how smart the text input sensing algorithms, is terribly practical. But I believe in GizmoProject, the Jabber/IM component is what drives the presence indicators on the buddy list. If not logged in on PC, but logged in on the N80i Gizmo client, my buddies can’t tell I’m online and available for the VoIP call. When I’m at the PC, I look to see if people are online before clicking to call. This glitch seems an oversight. And for people who really need to call me - they’ll call my mobile number since they don’t see me online, circumventing the entire value chain of logging on with Gizmo.
Source: Realtime Unified Communications
Stefan – You make a really good point about reporting on the negative aspects, and it’s something I’ll take to heart. I’ve pointed out some things I don’t care for, but I also have a list. For me personally, I find doing a good evaluation to be a really daunting task. I feel like I really need to invest about 60 days per telephone set to thoroughly evaluate them. That in part because of the learning curve and constant discovery of new things.
My intent is to, as some point when I feel I’m ready, do detailed writeup of each phone with pros, cons and a comparison grid. Perhaps I set to large a task for myself, but given that Nokia has graciously provided the phones, I feel I owe some comprehensive evaluation in response. That’s why my notes, even the one from yesterday, are mostly what I treat as my impressions. I feel like I’m still building up to the actual reviews and just sharing my impressions along the way to something more substantial.