Nokia N81 8GB starts shipping

Nokia has revealed today the global availability of Nokia N81 and Nokia N81 8GB. Nokia is promising we'll never get bored once we lay our hands on any of the Nokia N81 flavors and we believe them, especially after we've managed to examine one in a detail N81 preview last week.

The Symbian-based Nokia N81 smartphone comes quad-band GSM/EDGE and UMTS enabled and stands at 17.6 mm thickness and 140 g of weight. It boasts a 2.4" TFT display with QVGA resolution, stereo Bluetooth, Wi-Fi with UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) support and dedicated gaming keys. Nokia N81 is the first device armed with the new N-Gage platform and it has plenty of storage capacity to make good use of it.

The first edition of the Nokia N81 is a vanilla one that comes with a mciroSD slot and a 1GB or 2GB microSD card in the retail package, while the second one is called Nokia N81 8GB and flaunts the whopping 8GB of internal storage. Both will have 2 megapixel cameras with flash (no auto focus, sorry folks) for making snapshots or shooting VGA videos at 15fps and a secondary CIF camera for video calls. There is also a microUSB port and an audio/video 3.5 mm port.

Apart from the featured-packed hardware functionality, a couple of software innovations will grasp your attention. The first one is the 3D Multimedia Menu, a user-friendly interface that makes it fun to browse the multimedia content of the handset. The second one is the option to use a touch-sensitive Navy wheel, which makes picture and video browsing a real pleasure.

The estimated retail price of the Nokia N81 is 360 EUR before subsidies or taxes, while Nokia N81 8GB is expected to retail for 430 EUR before subsidies or taxes.