Nokia N81 8GB review: Black Beauty? (See all reviews)

Nokia has pre-loaded three N-Gage game demos on the phone, Space Impact, Asphalt 3D and Fifa07. These three demos are not quite in the same league as games from other portable gaming consoles but they are a rather large step above the usual mobile gaming experience.
The control keys above the display will have a big contribution to your improved gaming experience.

As we have already mentioned these games are demos only, the full versions can be purchased and downloaded for 20 Euro.

The Nokia N81 comes with the whole package of organizer applications and features of Symbian S60 phones. The calendar comes with Month, Week and Day views. Meeting, Anniversary, Memo, To-do, and all of them have their own fields and settings allowing you a further customization.

Other applications worth mentioning would be: Adobe PDF, converter, calculator, voice recorder and Nokia Maps

The phone's connectivity is also great. It has a microUSB port, Wi-Fi as well as Bluetooth v2.0 with A2DP and also supports GPRS, EDGE and UMTS networks. The Wi-Fi has support for all security standards such as: WEP, WPA, and WPA 2.

The large display together with the great browser make surfing the Internet a great pleasure. Most of the web pages will fit on the screen and look exactly like on your PC. Pages can be zoomed in and out using the "*" and "#" buttons; the mouse cursor is controlled with the help of the D-pad; the mini-map of the page appears on the screen when scrolling.

The N81’s browser also handles Flash objects and Java scripts with no problems at all.

The N81 is an impressive phone, but it is not really the revolutionary handset that many of us had expected. It has great multimedia features and looks like it could become a great gaming machine given the right software support.

There is no doubt however that the N81 was intended to be a niche product due to its mediocre camera, difficult to use D-pad and chunky dimensions. In Europe, the price tag for the N81 is around 400 Euro.