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Nokia N85 smartphone

Puts in a big-hitting performance

Audio and video entertainment are well catered for here. The N85 comes pre-loaded with an assortment of listening options, including a high quality music player - controlled by the navpad as well as the dedicated slider buttons - an FM radio and a podcasting app.

Nokia N85

A high-quality music player

The phone comes bundled with an 8GB Micro SD memory card – a welcome extra with the internal user storage clocking up a modest 85MB – and cards of up to 16GB are supported. Nokia scores top marks too for the 3.5mm headphone socket on the top of the phone. A two-part headset is supplied that's a bit better than most mobile earphones. It delivers a reasonable audio performance, but plug in a better set of headphones and you can get cracking sound out of the player, clear, rich and detailed, with full lower frequencies.

Many mobiles have an FM radio, but few have an FM transmitter built in. This very neat extra allows you to broadcast the tracks loaded on the N85 to any suitable FM radio within a 3m range, such as your car stereo or even friends’ mobile phone radios). You've access to the full FM frequency range, and it’s a doddle to operate.

Video playback is a treat too. The N85 supports MPEG 4, AVC, H.264, WMV, RV, Flash Video, and H.263/3GPP file formats, playing back in full screen mode that looks great for the screen space available. Nokia’s Video Centre app lets you browse though a roster of mobile video services and set up video feeds.

The N85 isn’t bad at capturing images as well. Its camera capabilities are similar to the N96’s: an autofocus 5Mp shooter with Carl Zeiss optics protected by a sliding lens cover - slide it down and the shooter fires up in a couple of seconds. It has a dedicated camera button, and if you don't want to use the slider panel zoom buttons, you can use the volume rocker instead.

Nokia N85

There's a 3.5mm headphone socket on top

Like other N-series phones, this one has has a vertical toolbar on the right of the display for fast access to the scene mode, flash, timer, and multi-shot options. Nokia has upgraded the interface so you can add other shooting shortcuts, such as brightness, colour tone, contrast, exposure, light sensitivity and white balance, to the default set.

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