Camera Phones Plaza

We've been fans of Nokia's Series 60 and S60 smartphones for years. Though they lagged behind the Palm and Pocket PC Phone competition in the bells and whistles category, they offered fantastic usability, great call quality, generally strong reception and nice styling. In 2006, S60 has caught up, and perhaps surpassed the competition, now offering 2 and 3MP cameras that are hard to beat, integrated WiFi on some models, QVGA and higher displays with high color depth, the usual Nokia great RF, smartphone syncing and Office capabilities and even QWERTY keyboards in models like the E61.

The Nokia N80 is part of Nokia's new Nseries of Symbian OS smartphones running S60. These are strong business phones (if you can forgo a QWERTY keyboard) with a multimedia bent. And let's face it: there are plenty of us who need a smartphone but also want a super camera, multimedia features and even an FM radio. Competitors have left us out in the cold and 2006 may be the year that Nokia wins us over. The one problem is Nseries phones aren't offered by any US Carrier as of this writing. So you'll need to buy one from nokiausa.com if available or otherwise from an importer. They're sold by Nokia and importers unlocked for use with any GSM carrier, which generally means T-Mobile and Cingular in the US.

First a tip: hold the camera still for 2 seconds after you hear the shutter sound. Or simply watch the viewfinder until the image post-view appears. That's the shutter lag, which wouldn't be so annoying if the shutter sound were in sync so one would know when it's OK to move the camera. If you get blurry photos, follow our 2 second rule and you'll get clear, pleasing shots. For some reason, macro mode doesn't have this shutter lag, but all other modes, including Auto, do. The N73 really doesn't take photos more quickly but the autofocus action on screen gives you a clue when it's safe to move the camera, as does the in-sync shutter sound.

The N80 is one of the few 3MP camera phones you can get in the US (the Samsung a990 from Verizon is the only US carrier offering, with other Nokia phones and Sony Ericsson imports filling in the rest of the field). Photos are truly very good if you follow the 2 second rule, and the N80's images lay to waste the average 1.3MP offering. Photos are fairly sharp and you can increase in-camera sharpening somewhat before images look harsh. There's a good amount of detail and you'll clearly see individual leaves and blades of grass in landscape shots, with focus falling off around the edges.

The camera has good shadow detail by camera phone standards and contrast is set conservatively by default which helps maintain shadow detail. You can of course also crank up the in-camera contrast but be careful of reducing detail and blowing out colors. Better to do your post-processing using your favorite image editor on the computer. And in-camera settings for contrast and sharpening don't stick; if you exit the camera app and re-launch it, these will be back at their defaults.

Colors are reasonably true with a noticeable warm bias and contrast is a bit low, leading to somewhat hazy shots. These are easily fixed in Photoshop and other image editors, and the N80's faults are indeed fewer than most camera phones. The Samsung a990 in comparison has very contrasty (but pleasing) images that have a slightly worse case of the warm to magenta color cast. To be fair, the a990 competes more directly in the camera department with the Nokia N73, since both have autofocus lenses, rather than the N80's fixed focus lens which can never be as sharp.

Our only other complaint is no lens cover, something a 3MP camera warrants. Like most all Nokias, the N80 does not do well in low light situations: take a photo in a dark place, even with the flash on, and be ready to do some serious noise reduction on the PC later.

File size is larger than N73's photos which is interesting given the greater detail and wider range of colors in the N73's photos. When taking the same subject at the same time of day from the same vantage point with both cameras set to their highest resolution we found that the N80's photo file size averaged 25% larger. N80 photos run between 800k and 1.3 meg for shots with a good amount of detail and color variation while the N73's are generally around 850k. More aggressive JPEG compression on the N73 is the likely cause.

The camcorder can shoot video at a maximum of 352 x 288 pixels in 24 bit color with AAC 16kHz mono audio at 15fps. It has 3 quality settings, high, medium (both MP4) and low for sharing (MMS) in 3GP format. Video quality is good by camera phone standards, though not as impressive as the N80's still shots by any means. It is clear overall with some artifacting and noise visible in shadows and dark areas. The video stabilization feature does a good job of reducing handheld jerkiness, but does reduce detail a bit.

Key features:

* Brilliant display
* Symbian OS
* Incredible web browser
* miniSD card slot (128MB miniSD card included in the package)
* Very good 3 megapixel camera with flash
* Excellent audio quality
* FM radio
* 40 MB internal memory
* All connectivity options - Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, IR, USB
* UMTS and EDGE support

Main disadvantages:

* Rather big dimensions
* Top row of the numeric keypad is hardly reachable
* No compatibility between Symbian 3rd Generation and lower versions
* FM radio lacks RDS
* No automatic keypad lock when slid in
* Camera lens is not protected



Read full review here.