After the success of Nokia N73, it was a sure bet that a successor would quickly appear and there is no doubt that Nokia N82 is going to be the one. It has only just hit the helves and is already predicted to be the next bestseller.
Things I liked
* 5 megapixel camera with auto focus and Carl Zeiss optics
* 2.4" 16M color QVGA display
* Xenon flash and active lens cover
* Support for 3G (with HSDPA), EDGE and GPRS
* Symbian OS 9.2 Series 60 3rd edition Feature Pack 1 UI
* TV-out functionality
* Stereo speakers
* Large capacity battery
* Wi-Fi with UPnP
* Built-in GPS receiver
* Nokia maps application
* Standard 3.5 mm audio jack on the top
Some disappointments
* Questionable ergonomics
* Below average GPS performance
* No RDS for the FM radio
* Extra charges for voice assisted navigation
* No office documents editing application
* No USB charging
Nokia N73 is the most successful Nseries handset to date, with sales figures far surpassing the rest of the N-series lot. The N82 comeson its heels and has become the most affordable of feature-loaded Nokia cameraphones. The retail price price is 450 Euro, which, given the high level of features and the 2GB of memory card, sounds reasonable.
Another potential rival is the Sony Ericsson K850; while a non-OS device, it would be worth comparing to the N82 before purchasing your next handset.
Well, it sure is silver
Nokia N82 measurs 112 x 50.2 x 17.3 mm. Weighing in at 114 g of weight the N82 could not be called compact. We are, however, talking about a 5 megapixel phones and, in its class, only the LG KU990 Viewty and Nokia G600 are lighter than N82. Despite its weight and size, it is very easily carried in a pocket.
The phone is covered in silver-tinted plastic with a shiny front and patterned back panel. The front panel is prone to fingerprints but the silver surface keeps them from showing too badly.
In the upper left corner of Nokia N82 is the ambient light sensor, just to the left of the video call camera. The earpiece grill is centered above the 2.4" TFT display.
The D-pad is found under the display with the two selection keys on each side. The Menu and the Clear key are found under the selection keys, while the Call and End keys are on the very edges of the phone. The multimedia key, new to Nokia, is located between the right selection key and the Clear key.
The left side of Nokia N82 has the microUSB slot, the memory card slot and the charger plug. The microSD slot has a neat plastic cap but the other two slots are uncovered, somewhat hurting the esthetics on this side.
The right side is loaded with controls. The stereo speakers are at the ends, while the zoom/volume key, the review key and the camera key are located between them. The speaker placement is in the same place as on Nokia N95. It goes without saying that the camera key has half-shutter mode. The review key is a convenient and quick way for jumping to your lastly saved photos.
At Nokia N82's top we find the Power key which is also used for switching profiles and locking the phone. Also on top is the 3.5mm standard audio jack and the neck/wrist strap eyelet. It is quite convenient to have the audio jack at the top, making it much easier to use with the phone inside a pocket.
The back side of the N82 is the home of the the 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics and the Xenon flash. The camera has a lens protecting cover that opens by a small silver slider right above it. It is easy enough to locate with a fingertip and not prone to accidental sliding.
Under the battery cover you will find the BP-6MT battery with a capacity of 1050 mAh. Standby is quoted at 225 hours, while Nokia claims talk time is 4 and a half hours. Our testing showed the battery good enough to power the handset for about three days of moderate usage. This is a bit more than what you can expect from Nokia N95-1 for example.
Display
Nokia N82 has a 2.4" TFT LCD display of QVGA resolution. Theoretically, it is capable of showing up to 16 million colors but its quality seemed lacking to me, with a loss of some brightness and washed out colors, especially when compared to Nokia N95 8GB. In bright sunlight it is as you would expect from any other recent Nokia - the display remains perfectly visible.
Telephony
With N82 signal reception is flawless, as you would expect in a high-end Nokia phone. The phone offers wonderful speaker quality and the sound during calls is very clear and without any interference. Nokia N82 uses the Symbian 9.2 OS with the Series60 3rd Edition user interface. The 128MB of RAM is an important factor to OS performance and a key feature of the phone. In everyday use, 128MB is practically impossible to fill.
Different menu views
Most screens of the user interface can be displayed in portrait or landscape mode. The screen automatically rotates when the device is turned to the left. The screen rotation is as fast as in Nokia N95 8GB - practically instant. There is no animation for the screen rotation like in the Apple iPhone; rather the screen just goes black, then pops back up in the desired mode.
The active stand-by display is available with Nokia N82. You can assign shortcuts to frequently used websires for quicker access. As the standard keypad lock pattern is a quick successive pressing of the left selection key and the asterisk , when the left kay is pressed in a normal day-to-day usage it will wait for about a second before acting as assigned to see if a lock command is to follow. Otherwise, the automatic key lock is activated after a pre-defined period. The options are from 5 seconds to an hour and you can switch this feature off if you see fit.
The built-in memory of 132MB is a respectable figure, but it can be extended by the included 2GB microSD memory card, although higher storage cards can be used. Accessing applications or any other files from the memory card is quick, with no noticable time lag from accessing the phone memory.
The multimedia menu is where Nokia N82 shines, like with all the recent Nseries models. It is near identical to the ones found on Nokia N81 and Nokia N95 8GB, with icons sorted by theme. They convert to drop-down menus when the respective tab is selected. If you don't like the layout you can rearrange icons to suit.
Like any Symbian phone, there is a built-in voice recognition system. It is fully speaker-independent and recognizes a high percentage of the user commands. Its performance can be matched only by Nokia N95 and N95 8GB.
There are five preinstalled themes on Nokia N82, and you can download as many other themes as you wish. Before doing that make sure that you check out the pre-bundled ones as we personally happened to find them quite nice.
Phonebook
The phonebook of Nokia N82 is simply great. Storage is available for a virtually unlimited number of contacts and fields, with all the available memory at your disposal. Contacts are ordered by first or last name and can be searched by gradual typing of any of their names.
Editing a contact offers many preset fields and they can replicated as many times as you want, or you can create new fields if you wish. Personal ringtones and video are also available. You can group contacts and give a specific ringtone to each group.
The Call log application is another of Nokia N82's strengths. Up to 20 call records in each of the tabs for outgoing, received and missed calls can be held. These are accessed with the Call key from the stand-by menu. After entering the Log application from the main menu, you see a list of all your network communications for the past 30 days. Included are messages, calls and data transfers.
Messaging
If you are a texting super user, Nokia N82 might not be the one for you. With the less than great keypad, typing doesn't come as nice and easy as you will want. In terms of software, though, the phone is performing very well indeed.
There are four different message editors - one for each type of supported messages: SMS, MMS, audio message and e-mail. The SMS editor is well known to all Symbian S60 smartphone users. There is a bracketed indicator showing the number of separate parts the message will be divided into for sending. The MMS editor has virtually the same interface, but with the addition of a subject line.
The email client is familiar to anyone who has used a Symbian powered phone. You have the choice of downloading headers only or the whole messages. Also included is support for attachments, so Nokia N82 can meet almost any email requirements.
As I already said, Nokia N82 is not a dream texting device but it's good enough for the occasional user.
Music player
The music player is yet another good Nokia N82 application. There are no dedicated music keys; you control it via the D-pad, but you won't miss them. Supported are a large number of formats, such as MP3, AAC, eAAC+ and WMA.
Sorting songs by artist, album, genre and composer is automatic and searching tracks by gradual typing is also available. Transferring tracks to Nokia N82 can be achieved via Bluetooth, USB or by simply downloading from the internet.
As opposed to the Nokia N81, the music player of Nokia N82 can be switched off when it is not needed. This will save some RAM but with so much available operating memory this is really not that important. Nokia N82 includes support for the A2DP Bluetooth profile, which allows listening to your music on a Bluetooth stereo headset.
Video player
For playing video clips, Nokia N82 features a Real player. The video player can be displayed in either portrait or landscape mode and fullscreen. Watching a video clip on a screen this large is a really enjoyable experience.
The FM radio can scan and save the available stations in your area. If internet connection is available the Visual radio application can download all the local stations and save them to the handset with their names. We would have preferred RDS support, though not having it isn't really that much of a disappointment.
A camera above all expectations
The camera is surely Nokia N82's best feature. The camera set up time is really short. It is similar to Nokia N95 8GB, totaling less than three seconds. These times are only achievable with the automatic preview turned off. A solid result by all means, losing to Sony Ericsson K850 by only tenths of a second.
The camera user interface is practically identical to N95 8GB and offers the same extensive settings - starting from manual white balance and ISO sensitivity and including exposure compensation, sharpness and contrast settings, as well as various effects.
Gridline can also be applied to the viewfinder to assist you in framing you photos, using the photographic rule-of-thirds. Using it to align your subjects and place points of interest on or near the lines and their intersecting points makes your photos more professional and esthetic. The rule-of-thirds also applies to landscape shots. The sequence mode and self-timer are no news. The Xenon flash can be set in four ways: automatic, always on, red-eye reduction and always off.
The picture quality is simply the best you can find on the market, which is a bit surprising. The Nokia N82 is supposed to be an all-in-one device, but it outperforms even dedicated cameraphones when it comes to quality. The only thing Nokia N95 and Nokia N95 8GB were lacking was an adequate flash. Now that Xenon is implemented with Nokia N82, this takes us to a whole new level.
Recording
The quality of the videos recorded with Nokia N82 is as good as any recorded with any of the Nokia N95 versions. That is to say, simply awesome. The phone captures video at 30 frames per second, which is way beyond any of the competition. The sole exception here would be the the 5-megapixel LG KU990 Viewty, which is the only worthy rival worth mentioning.
Videos are captured in MPEG-4 format. Available features include night mode and color effects. Warning: videos of this quality fill up your memory faster than you might guess - a minute of video takes about 20MB of memory. Thus, you have about 100 minutes of video on the 2GB memory card, assuming there's nothing else on it.
Connectivity
Transferring data is simply a dream. Every common data transfer medium is supported. USB 2.0 and Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP to HSCSD, through GPRS and EDGE to 3G with HSDPA support - the Nokia N82 has it all covered. If that were not enough, Wi-Fi with UPnP support is also available. The only thing missing with Nokia N82 is the Infrared port but honestly, who needs it anyway. Simply put, you will be able to transfer data from or to almost any device.
Web browser
Simply put, browsing the internet with Nokia N82 is a pleasure. No matter how complex the web page, it fits perfectly on the screen. The virtual mouse cursor takes browsing up a notch. A mini-map can be activated to help navigating your way around large sites where lots of scrolling is required. The zoom level is also adjustable with only a few key presses.
The large amount of RAM is the best thing that could happen to a browser. Even if you load very heavy web pages and have a few applications running in the background, you are unlikely to run out of RAM. True, the 2.4" display is not as nice as the 2.8" screen in Nokia N95 8GB but even very small fonts are readable.
Organizer
Simply name the application and you can be sure that the handset has it. The calendar has three different types of view - monthly, weekly and daily, and four types of events available for setting up - Meeting, Memo, Anniversary and To-do. Every event has its own unique fields, some of which allow an alarm to be activated at a preset time to act as a reminder.
The mobile office is well presented, with preinstalled applications able to open Word and Excel files seamlessly. PDF reader is also included and a ZIP manager allows extracting archived files straight from your phone. Other included organizing and time-management applications are: a great unit converter, calculator and voice recorder, as well as the Notes application.
GPS
As in the Nokia N95 versions, the N82 has a built-in GPS receiver.Their performance is virtually the same. Unluckily, the problem with the slow initial satellite lock still exists with Nokia N82. The phone needs quite some time to find you initial position, especially if you start it when you are in a moving vehicle.
The GPS receiver works with the free Nokia Maps application, which is one of the software applications to offer the most detailed maps. The basic information is free, because charges apply to the voice guidance and turn-by-turn navigation. You get a three-day trial that goes with the new version of the Nokia Maps application, so you can see if the voice navigation is worth the cost.
The Nokia Maps application itself is not bad at all and has decent looks. In addition, its route planning algorithm can be customized to the user preferences. Toll roads and motorways can be avoided as can tunnels and ferries. The route selection can be set to fastest or shortest.
The overall impression of using the Nokia N82 as a GPS navigation system is quite positive. If you don't have the highest expectations, you might find the Nokia N82 GPS perfectly adequate.
Final words
Nokia N82 has all the tools to become a true bestseller, combining full smartphone functionality with the best camera on the mobile phone market. Upgrading from Nokia N73 seems the definitive choice, if not the only option. If you are a cameraphone lover, the decision is as simple as that - if you want the best camera on a phone and you're willing to pay for it, Nokia N82 is the way to go.
  
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