What are other people around the net saying about the N81?
Posted by Stefan on Saturday, November 17th, 2007 at 9:58 am under Nokia
My Nokia N81 review upset quite a lot of people, but I look at it as a learning experiance for Nokia. I essentially blasted the device for being over priced, under featured and having shady build quality. Now I hope you don’t read my reviews like they are scriptures from the holiest of holy books. Personally I’ll read at least 10 reviews of anything before I buy. All About Symbian, Matthew Miller, Ricky Cadden, Eldar from Mobile Review, Engadget and others have all had a chance to test out the N81. Read their opinions as well, but more importantly try and visit your nearest shop to play with the device yourself. After all, 430 Euros before taxes for the 8 GB model is insane when you figure that the N82 is only 450 Euros before taxes and offers the same audio quality, at least with my initial testing. Mobile City Online, a site for people living in America, recently put the N82 up for preorder for $600. I never bought anything from them, but they have a lot of street credit over on Howard Forums. Back on topic, here are the N81 reviews:
- Steve from All About Symbian: Initial thoughts on the device.
- Ewan from All About Symbian:
- Part 1: The hardware
- Part 2: The music experiance
- Matt Miller over at ZD|Net has 3 videos along with a fair amount of text.
- Ricky the Symbian Guru:
- Part 1: Q&A with his readers
- Part 2: Music quality
- Part 3: Gaming
- Part 4: Camera
- Part 5: The podcasting application
- Part 6: Build Quality
- Part 7: Wrap up
- Ricky also writes professionally at Mobile Burn, his review is here.
- Mobile Review, famous for ridiculously long reviews with lots of high quality pictures.
- Engadget, the original gadget blog.
- Om Malik, kind of famous, but he doesn’t know anything about phones, seriously.
- Smape, I only found out about them recently, love how much detail they go into.
There you go, that should be enough reading and enough of a variety of opinions for you to mull over before you purchase a Nokia N81.
November 17th, 2007 at 2:32 pm
That Smape does deliver and a long one it is.
November 19th, 2007 at 9:51 am
[...] his latest post on the device however, Stefan calls for any prospective N81 owners to make sure they do adequate research into the device, and ideally get their hands on one before making a decision. This also means that [...]
December 11th, 2007 at 10:33 am
I wonder why so many reviews praise the feel of the naviwheel and the main button cluster. When I tested it at the store, the wheel felt unresponsive, undersized, cluttered with other buttons near it and generally utterly useless for gaming purposes - so much so that I can’t even imagine anyone actually playing anything with this device. Even navigating the menus with it was hard, let alone something that requires accurate split-second moves.
A gaming phone should have a directional controller as robust as actual handheld consoles do, yet Nokia’s effort is in no way comparable to Nintendo DS or Gameboy Advance.
December 11th, 2007 at 10:43 am
I agree with you 110% samperi, but some people have different feelings. The point of this blog post was to let people know what others are saying about the device. At the end of the day I encourage people to do what you did, go to a store and play with the device itself before purchasing it.
June 23rd, 2008 at 3:43 pm
[...] What are other people around the net saying about the N81? [...]