Nokia N82 review: 5 MP Smartphone (See all reviews)

Every phone should have a good system for managing the contacts and we must say the phonebook of Nokia N82 is truly a Symbian goodie. All contacts are displayed as a list and if they have a picture ID, it can be seen in the top left corner of the screen as a thumbnail with a very small size – this is also the case for an incoming call.

The contacts application on the N82 is robust, offering support for multiple fields, including addresses, email, and multiple phone numbers. There is also a possibility of creating caller groups and assign each group its own ringtone or even a video ringtone, depending on your preferences.

When storing a new contact you are provided with the basic fields, but if you press the the “Add Detail” function you have almost no restrictions on the number of fields or phone numbers. The Nokia N82 also features speaker-independent voice dialing that can be activated by pressing and holding the right softkey for a few seconds.

We found the reception strength on the Nokia N82 to be pretty good, and even in lower-signal areas, the phone was able to hold a call and deliver solid audio quality.

The loudspeaker was equally sharp and we were impressed by the stereo speakers although there were some distortions on its loudest setting and it was quite difficult to understand what the caller was saying.

The Call log application is also one of Nokia N82's strengths, being capable of holding up to 20 call records in each of the tabs for outgoing, received and missed calls. These are all accessible from the Call key in the stand-by menu and if you enter the Log application from the main menu, you'll see a detailed list of all your network communications for the past 30 days.

The messaging menu is just what you would have expected from a S60 smartphone. The Inbox is a shared box for the received text and multimedia messages as well as for messages received via Bluetooth.

However, with a keypad like this typing is not that easy as we would have wished but in terms of software the phone is acting much better. The phone is capable of sending and receiving four different types of messages: SMS, MMS, audio message and e-mail.

The SMS editor is well known to all of us and comes with a characters counter limited to 160. The MMS editor has almost the same interface as the SMS one and only the added subject line makes the difference.

The email client does not support HTML email, but it is capable of downloading email at user-defined intervals. We were able to setup 3 different email accounts with no problems at all.

There is a mailbox setup wizard included to help you save some writing, but it does a very poor job of actually setting up the mailbox, requiring the user to go back and manually set some further details.