We just messed around with
Nokia's new N86, and while the form factor and feel of the device seem a little last-gen, there's no denying the camera's quality. Some of the soft button the face of the phone are a little difficult for our large fingers to press, but the d-pad is pure quality, as is the generic-looking numeric keypad -- T9ers rejoice. In traditional N-series fashion, the slide mechanism is practically perfect, with a meaty, satisfying and easy motion to it, and the general feel of the device, including the seamless glossy front, screams quality. The camera we played with seemed a little glitchy in operation -- it's still pre-production -- but the images were excellent. The LED flash won't be able to handle a large dimly lit room, but can do close-quarters indoors shots just fine, and should match up well with other high resolution shooters in the outdoor arena. The OLED screen, but it might not have been set at full brightness -- it's crisp, but not necessarily vibrant. Overall it's a "nice" handset, but somehow 8 megapixels alone doesn't seem to justify another go at this fairly dated and chubby N-series form factor -- but maybe that's just us.
Update: We bumped up the brightness and stacked the phone up against the iPhone 3G and found the N86's screen to be considerably brighter -- another win for OLED! There's also now some video after the break!
posted Feb 17th 2009 4:13AM
I found a interesting N86 hands on video at http://nseries-phones.blogspot.com
I found an interesting spam link at the comments part of www.engadget.com
Why the dishonesty?
Why not simply say "look at my blog over at ...."?
Low, Pragnesh. Low. :(
i have been hating the flush keypads that manufacturers have been coming out with lately.
this t9er is definitely rejoicing over the individual keys seen here!
unfortunately that seems to be balanced out by the stupid tic tac sized soft keys.
id really like to see this form factor with touch & 5th edition. oh and something better than led flash.
It doesn't look too ugly after all. And I'm going to say it, This is what the N85 should have been and blah blah blah.
It's a shame, the new HTC and a few other phones don't seem to have the OLED screen, especially the new SE.. I think this will come back to bite a few in the ass. I predict also the new iphone will have OLED, and they will market the hell out of it, and after seeing this video, I can't see why not. OLED looks beautiful, clearly the way to go.
did anybody else notice that they both say N85 on them and not N86? Looks like they're creating an upgraded version of the N85 and following the footsteps of the N95 series. That being assumed, I can now understand why it doesn't have the 2.8" display on it I was hoping to see. Guess I'll have to wait for the N96 8MP then haha. And maybe that time around they'll get rid of that flush keypad and remove all those stupid media buttons around the D pad. I hope this still has the NaviWheel on it dammit. I finally might have my upgrade for my N95-3. Nice job Nokia, but lets see this in the form of an N9_ something so you can go all out on everything.
Also, did anyone notice that the multimedia button is gone? (On the N85, it sits between the right soft key, the end key, and the Clear key). Does that imply that the "Now Playing", "Photos", "TV & Video", etc. tiles are gone?
(On the N95 this button was even more useful, as a long press would go straight to the currently playing song in the music player...)
I want to see pics of the back cover removed, how do you do it?