Nokia N85 - the hidden top model

Introduction

Yeah, this review has been delayed on purpose, but it’s still quite fresh. N85 has been at us for testing for more than a week now, it has arrived along with N79 and Sony Ericsson C905. We have already written about these two, but N85 takes some time to digest. I had all the time I needed, XXL GSM has been waiting patiently for me to return the phone.

Sony Ericsson C905, Samsung Innov8 and Nokia N85

N85 should have been N96. Specs characteristic of a top model, a normal processor and some other features characterize it that make it different from all other Nokia handsets. Let’s cut to the point, N85 has two very important bonuses: the first is the OLED screen and the other is the smaller miracle that Nokia has finally managed to make its smartphone chargeable via a USB cable from the computer. N85’s launch is a real achievement for the Finnish company.

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This is an important milestone, so I have tried to be as precise as possible and I have read a couple of reviews on other sites, and just I have started writing this review, Tony has dropped me an email and offered me to take a look at his blog in order to make things perfectly clear.

Exterior

The really large box has an impressive amount of accessories inside. Of course the USB cable is here, we have a TV-out wire, a stereo headset that can be taken apart and it has a remote, and we have the first charger in the history of Nokia smartphones that doesn’t have the old, needle-like plug, but it has microUSB connection, hooray! Besides these we have an 8 GB SDHC card inside the phone, which caused me some problems as my good old card reader simply didn’t detect it.

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At a first glance N85 itself is no breakthrough in design. It looks quite much like N81, about which we don’t have very fantastic memories, but it has a cleaner design. The shiny black plastic collects fingerprints rather efficiently and it’s even a bit slippery. On the sides we can observe a bit rougher surface, but the back is shiny again and its pattern, layout and the materials used are exactly the same as we have seen on N79, but this time it even has some play.

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The cover doesn’t have much stuff on it, but we could say it’s clean. The QVGA resolution display has a diagonal of 2.6”, which is more than enough. Below it the massive black shine is broken only by the call handling keys, the navigation key’s silver frame and the multimedia key. Anyway, if we slide the handset open it turns out that we have lot more buttons as a white light turns up to show the place of the menu, delete and the function keys.

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The cover can be slid in two directions. When sliding it upwards we get to see the numeric keys, which are pretty crowded and they’re not even separated vertically, and although the overall impression is not bad, but I have pressed the wrong key quite a lot of times when typing. If we slide the cover downwards, we can access the multimedia keys like on N96. There are four of these, but only the middle two get lit by default. The backlight of the side keys turns on only if their functions become active. Such a case is music playback, where we can use these for seeking tracks, or when browsing pictures these are the keys that we can use for zooming.

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We can see familiar keys on the sides of the phone. Besides the microSD slot, everything is on the right side, we can see the volume control keys, the camera’s exposure key and the keylock slider. The bottom of the phone is completely smooth, but on the top there is a 3.5 mm jack and a microUSB connector, and, according to ancient Finnish customs, the profile-changer and power button is also placed here.

Menu, hardware

It’s worth starting with the display. This is not the first Nokia to have a QVGA resolution OLED screen, 7900 Prism had a similar thing, but in this case the 2.6” diagonal is fuc… ahem… really great. Why is OLED good? No, not because it’s expensive, but it because we can see the same thing from all angles, it has high contrast and it even has a low consumption. When put near N79, N85 is simply beautiful, and this is the most evident when we’re looking at pictures on the screen, but it’s great for everyday use as well, although bright sunlight makes this one unreadable too.

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The soul of N85 is of course Symbian 9.3, which has Series60 platform running on it, version 3.2. We again have those cool animations in the menu like on N78; to tell the truth the system is the fastest when we disable these, which is no wonder, as this handset has the 369 MHz Freescale ARM11 CPU, just like almost all Nokia smartphones since a while ago (with the exception of N96 of course). We have the benchmark results again:

You can see that N85 has about the performance we might expect based on the raw specifications, and this is all right. Two things are noteworthy about browsing the menu: the first is the navi-wheel feature, which makes it possible to make circular motion with our fingertips on the navigation key and thus move around, while the other feature is the built-in motion sensor, which rotates the picture automatically, according to the phone’s position. As for me, I’m okay without any of these features, although the second one might come in handy when using multimedia functions.

We have already written a lot about the Symbian system that can be highly customized with themes, we even have a dedicated article, and reviews of N78, N79 or N96, which have almost exactly the same software, can also be a good place to start at if we need additional information. Now, for the sake of simplicity, we’d like to show you the system with an almost 10-minute long video:

Basic functions, games

We have nothing new to tell you here, besides those that were available on N79. The phonebook is extremely versatile, we can record an unlimited amount of data and we can even copy the contacts to the memory card if we’d like to transfer them to a different handset, or we’d just simply like to archive them. Voice IDs cannot be changed, and since Feature Pack 2 images attached to contacts are displayed at a normal size in case of incoming calls.

There are no problems with messaging either, the SMS and MMS editor is blameless, I have already mentioned the slight problem with the keys. Compared to N79, on N85 I didn’t see any trace of its email client supporting communication with Exchange servers, but this might appear in a later software version.

The calendar has the usual month and week views, we can easily add one of the four types of events. The calendar is the usual one, just like the alarm clock and the office suite includes the good old Adobe PDF and Zip applications, just like QuickOffice, which can be used for viewing Office files. We again have to observe that by default this works in read-only mode, if we’d like to edit documents we first have to buy the full version. For money.

Games are again represented by the N-Gage menu, there are quite a lot of games pre-installed, all but one being demo versions. It only depends on us, which one of them is the full version, as Nokia gives one of them as a present, hooray. The N-Gage interface has four tabs; the main screen displays the most recently played game and our scores. Then comes the list of available games, and then our own profile and our position in the world, online buddies, etc., and then finally we get a recommendation screen with the new games.

Multimedia

The camera is the same one we have told off already in the N79 review. The lens cover is a nice feature, it protects the lens from dust and it needs an ideal amount of force to be applied in order to open it (e.g. it won’t open and start the camera by itself). There is no Xenon flash, but the 5 megapixel sensor of course has autofocus. The exposure button on the side is very soft, we need to press it really hard in order to make it take the picture after focusing, but at least the software works pretty fast.

The range of settings is the usual, we can see the same on almost every Nseries Nokia model. The photos look astonishing on the phone’s screen, but we can see the flaws when viewing them on a computer. The colors are quite okay, but the pictures lack details, sometimes the autofocus is not perfect either, but we have an impressive amount of image noise in the darker areas. There is quite a lot of room for improvements, this doesn’t live up to N82, but we are already used to Nokia fixing some things, possibly with the next software version.

On the next-to-the-last picture you can see Bocha’s attempt of a tomato soup. A la Toscana.

Videos can be recorded in VGA resolution, at 30 fps, just as usual, we might even record a short documentary movie on the 8 GB card. When browsing the pictures we should slide the cover open, as in this case we can zoom with the press of a button. Otherwise the multimedia menu is almost the same as on the sister models.

I can praise N85 in terms of music. It’s not bad on its own either, it’s loud enough, but it has no distortion (even though there is of course no bass), the FM-transmitter also works perfectly, and although it might have been unnecessary I have been measuring again and I have observed that it has a range of about 3-5 meters. Unfortunately it’s not ideal in a car, we can observe hissing quite a lot of times, but it’s really okay if it’s attached and not moving.

The headset can be taken apart again after the remote, but even if it wouldn’t be this type, we still shouldn’t be panicking, as there is a standard 3.5 mm jack output sitting on top of the phone, so we can attach any headset to it. The software has the usual options, there is nothing exceptional, but we have everything (equalizer, album covers, sorting by ID3 tags), so there’s no reason to complain. We again have two kinds of radios: there is the Visual Radio with RDS that needs a headset in order to function, as that is the antenna, and we have the Internet Radio, which makes use of “mobile broadband”.

GPS, data transfer

N85 has GPS too, and it’s even the Assisted kind, so it makes use of the network as well when determining our position. It connects to the satellites really fast, although at first it only approximates our position, but it still has a precision of about 50 meters (even though I’ve been in the bathroom that has no windows), and then when it finally sees the sky it locates us with maximum precision. We still have to pay for the route planner and voice navigation part of Nokia Maps and I’d rather not pay €99 EUR for this nowadays, but the 3 months of free trial is included again. The satellite view has been impressive as well, Google Maps doesn’t yet know the house where I’m living at, but Nokia does, even though Google performs better in other places.

Theoretically there are no problems in terms of data transfer, but practically but at first I had some problems with this. The Settings Wizard just didn’t want to accept truth, it has found the Vodafone network settings, but it didn’t want to activate them, it just turned on WLAN. A reset helped, but I have been really annoyed by this.

Not counting this little intermezzo, there are no problems, as we have GPRS, EDGE, UMTS and HSDPA support. Besides these there is WLAN, Bluetooth 2.0 (stereo) and USB connection, I had no problems with any of them, they worked nicely. USB transfer was surprisingly fast, it had a speed of about 2 Mbytes/s.

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The battery is a BL-5K, it has a performance of 1200 mah. Thanks to this and the OLED screen N85 has a pretty good uptime, I can really imagine that if I hadn’t been talking for hours every day it would have stayed online for not two, but even four days. As for me, I didn’t even use the charger, I can finally say that I have fed a Symbian Nokia from the computer. Hurray!

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N85 is a very good handset. This should have been called N96. It’s currently no cheap thing; its price is 20% higher than the one of N79, which has similar features. I trust that this will fall a bit in the future and so I can give this award:

Nokia N85

Bog

Translated by Szaszati

Nokia N85 has been provided by XXL GSM.
The handset can be purchased at:
Budapest VI. Jókai tér 6.

Specifications

Nokia N85
	General
	Technology	GSM, UMTS, HSDPA
	Size	103 x 50 x 16 mm
	Weight	128 grams
	Available colors	black
	Display
	Display diagonal	2.6”
	Display resolution	240 x 320 pixels
	Display type	AM-OLED
	Number of colors	16.7 million
	Memory
	Phonebook capacity	dynamic
	SMS memory / max. MMS size	dynamic / 300KB
	Internal memory	70 MB
	Memory expandability	microSDHC (base package: 8GB)
	Data transfer
	Frequency bands	850/900/1800/1900 MHz
	GPRS / EDGE	Class 10 (4+1/3+2) / Class 10 (236.8 kbps)
	UMTS / HSDPA	present (384 kbps) / present (3.6 Mbps)
	IrDA / Bluetooth	none / 2.0 (A2DP too)
	WiFi	802.11 b/g
	USB	microUSB 2.0
	Push-to-talk / RSS	present / present
	GPS receiver	present
	Basic functions
	Profiles	present
	Vibra function	present
	Built-in handsfree	present
	Voice dialing / voice commands	present / present
	Sound recorder	present (max. 1 hour)
	Alarm clock	present, also when turned off
	Predictive text entry	T9
	Software
	Platform	Symbian OS 9.3 Series 60 v3.2 Feature Pack 2
	WAP / HTML browser	present / present
	E-mail client	present (POP3, IMAP4, authenticated)
	Java	present, MIDP 2.0
	Games	N-Gage
	Currency converter	present
	Extra software	QuickOffice, Adobe PDF, Zip, Nokia Maps
	Multimedia
	Main camera	5 megapixels, autofocus, flash
	Secondary camera	present, CIF resolution
	Video recording	present, VGA, 30fps
	Music player	present, can run in background
	Equalizer	present
	FM radio	present - RDS
	Battery
	Main battery	1200 mAh Li-Ion
	Standby time	363 hours
	Talk time	350 minutes
	Other
	internet radio, naviwheel, FM-transmitter, TV-out