Nokia N82 review: Comes with xenon

Themes

There are five preinstalled themes on Nokia N82, all of which are named Nseries. The rest is left to the imagination of the user, as you can download as many other themes as you wish. Before doing that make sure that you check out the pre-bundled ones as we personally happened to find them quite nice.

The list of all available Nokia N82 themes

Phonebook

The phonebook of Nokia N82 is a true Symbian goodie. It is simply great. There is storage place for a virtually unlimited number of contacts and fields, with all the available memory potentially usable for contacts. Good luck trying to fill that up. Contacts can be freely ordered by first or last name and can naturally be searched by gradual typing of any of their names.

A phonebook by Symbian

Editing a contact offers an enormous variety of preset fields and you can replicate each of them as many times as you like. You can also create new fields if you happen to be able to think of one. We personally find it difficult to think of something Nokia has missed here. Personal ringtones and video are also available for assigning. If you prefer you may group your contacts and give a specific ringtone to each group.

Editing a contact and some of the available fields

The Call log application, although not exactly a part of the phonebook, is also one of Nokia N82's strengths. It can hold up to 20 call records in each of the tabs for outgoing, received and missed calls. These are all accessed with the Call key from the stand-by menu. 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. These include messages, calls and data transfers. The period can be shortened in order to save some space but you are quite unlikely to do that, as even with a huge number of calls the log only takes a few miserly kilobytes of memory space.

Call log is as detailed as it can get with Nokia N82

Messaging

If you are all about texting, Nokia N82 might not be the perfect device for you. With a keypad like this typing doesn't come as nice and easy as we would have wished. However, in terms of software the phone is performing a whole lot better.

There are four different message editors - one for each type of supported messages: SMS, MMS, audio message and e-mail. The SMS editor is the well know intuitive application for all Symbian S60 smartphones. It has a counter of the characters left to the limit of 160. There is also an indicator in brackets showing the number of separate parts the message will be divided into for sending.

The Message editor is a great application indeed

It goes without saying that a delivery report can be activated. The reports pop up on the standby screen when the keypad is unlocked, and are subsequently saved in a separate folder in the messaging sub-menu. When you are exiting the message editor without having sent the message, the editor prompts saving it to the Drafts folder or discarding it.

"...If you are all about texting, Nokia N82 might not be the perfect device for you. With a keypad like this typing doesn't come as nice and easy as we would have wished. However, in terms of software the phone is performing a whole lot better..."

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The MMS editor has virtually the same interface as the one we just described, with the added subject line being the only difference.

The MMS editor differs only by the subject line

Now, the audio message is technically also an MMS but obviously it is more important for people at Nokia and they have created a separate editor for it. The editor can either record the message on the spot or use a previously recorded sound clip.

The audio message editor has a somewhat different design

The email client won't surprise anyone who has ever used a Symbian powered phone. It can download headers only, as well as the whole messages. There is also support for attachments, so Nokia N82 can meet almost any requirement regarding the user emailing needs.

Both the email client and the email editor do a great job

Generally, Nokia N82 is not the dream texting device but it's good enough for occasional usage and if you are not always on the rush when typing messages. And, after all, this is about what most users do.