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.
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.
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.
COMMENTS
@Tony
Thankyou - I didn't see that - some further in depth battery tests would be welcome though, My Nokia n95 gives me 2 days if I dont touch it, it gives me less than half a day if the radio is on (whether actually playing or not), about 5 hours of constant music playback, about 3 hours solid internet browsing (3G) and much less with WiFi.
Nokia seem to completely overlook battery life.
@ Steve Sutton
Quote: "...and boast about some bloke who designed their lens (yeah, whatever - I don't care if Ronald McDonald designed the lens, as long as the pictures are ok!)..."
I doubt that Nokia are actually getting Carl Zeiss to personally design their lenses for them. Not when you consider that the guy has been dead for more than 120 years.
EPIC FAIL.
Flash and media button (@ Joe K)
Absolutely agree with that one mate - It utterly baffles me that people put 5+ MP cameras in phones, and boast about some bloke who designed their lens (yeah, whatever - I don't care if Ronald McDonald designed the lens, as long as the pictures are ok!), and then some shitty flash which means photos taken in low light conditions are blurry and dark - often, indoor photos will have a very yellow tint too!
Dear Nokia - The Xenon flash was the killer app on the N82, without which I would not have upgraded. I read this article and was considering upgrading to the N85 (especially because of the FM transmitter, which I've been trying to buy separately for my N82), but the lack of xenon flash means I will not buy it. You fail!
Oh, and one more thing - please, for the love of god remove the sucky media/gallery/whatever it is called button - it makes me want to throw my phone at the wall/out the window/at the nearest Nokia designer/etc... on an almost daily basis, when it activates, despite my not intending it to!
(Thumbs down for the phone, not the article!)
The rights to many N85 functions may be auctioned in Hong Kong next June
As I see it, they can only sell that to which they own the rights. It is my understanding that certain patent rights, (which may, or of course, may not, impinge upon some of their geographic markets), are going to be auctioned in Hong Kong next June. If indeed that turns out to be correct, they should worry about that as surely they would not wish to become a hostage to the fortunes of, say, a new upstart Chinese or Indian wireless phone manufacturer; would they?
