Nokia N81 preview: Hands on N-Gage

Nokia N81 8GB 360-degree view

Designed to impress

The Nokia N81 measures 17.6 mm in thickness and weighs good 140 g. However it's surprisingly pocketable and it's real joy having it in our office. You may notice a rather strong resemblance to the Nokia 6110 Navigator, which we reviewed earlier. Now, as you may probably know there are two editions of the Nokia N81 to be produced - a vanilla one that comes with a microSD slot and a 1GB or 2GB microSD card in the retail package, and Nokia N81 8GB edition, which we got for testing.

The N81 is rather nice and comfortable to hold

The front panel of the Nokia N81 8GB is dominated by the large 2.4" 16M color TFT display with QVGA resolution. As you know Nokia displays are our favorites. Currently, probably only the iPhone display outmatches those.

Nokia N81 has a great large display

You will probably notice that all the keys are flush with the design lines. It must be noted that some of them are rather hard to press - some of them need a good, hard shove in order to get them to work. Otherwise, pretty much the whole bunch of the keys has a good tactile feedback. And when we say "bunch" we really mean it - the front panel hosts as many as 11 keys without counting the alphanumeric keypad that is. While some of them may seem touch sensitive at first sight, they are not (except for the Navi wheel that is).

The keypad looks as a touch sensitive one • that on top the display is actually the gaming keys

The alphanumeric keypad is totally flush but yet nice to use

Have you seen lately a Nokia with hardware keylock?

The gaming keys and the music keys get revealed only when they can be put to use