Nokia N86

Build quality: 8/10
Applications: 7/10
Interface: 7/10
Value-for-money: 7/10
Overall rating: 7/10

+ 8 megapixel camera
+ Plenty of multimedia functions
+ Good quality build
- Average picture quality



In the box
- Nokia N86 8MP
- 3.5mm headphones
- Micro USB cable
- Micro USB charger
- Manual

The Nokia N86 8MP is a feature packed N-Series phone with numerous multimedia functions. However, the main addition is a piece of serious hardware- an 8 megapixel, 3264x2448 pixels, wide 28mm Carl Zeiss lens camera.

Let’s take a look at the N86.

Design

Nokia’s N86 has a slider format, and a matte black exterior. There is a 2.6’ AMOLED 16 million colour screen, the colours and images come off as average and aren’t particularly vibrant. There vanity camera is located above the screen. The slider has a very good built, and has that little tactile bump when we slid opened the keyboard.

Moving on to the frontal keypad, the keys are thin and pill-shaped. There are two shortcut keys to pre-defined routes. Then to the sides flanking the d-pad are the call/end call buttons. The menu button is located at the 45 degree angle on the bottom left, and on the right is the cancel button. The central d-pad serves as the main navigator and confirms your selection.

Slide the front screen upwards, and you’ll see the tried and true alphanumeric keypad beneath it. The alphanumeric keys were designed with extra room between the keys, and T9 lovers should have no problems with the keys. The multimedia keys were also exposed when sliding the screen downwards, where we’ll explain a bit more at the music section.

The top of the Nokia N86 has the power button, the 3.5mm jack and the microUSB port. The left spine of the phone has the lock/unlock toggle key. On the right, the volume toggle and quick camera button is located here. Lastly, the back of the phone has the 8 MP camera and the kickstand is also located here.

Open the back cover and you’ll the see microSD slot, which is hot-swappable. The battery pack secures the SIM card in place.

Feature

The Symbian OS v9.3 S60 rel. 3.2 feature pack 2, powers the N86, the UI is pretty straightforward. There home screen has top shortcut keys, which can be tweaked to provide your favourite shortcuts. There are three horizontal tabs can be tweaked as well. Head into the main menu, the simple 3x4 grid layout is the first thing you’ll see. The S60 looks tidy and all the apps are packed in the main icons.

Email, text and multimedia options are all here, no push mail options however. PIM wise there is a document viewer, calculator, converter, ZIP and Adobe PDF reader. There is also a voice recorder.

The Nokia N86 8MP uses an ARM 11 434 MHz CPU, and that did equal some pretty decent speeds from the phone. There’s also 8 GB internal memory with 128 MB RAM, and the microSD slot supports up to 16GB.

The N86’s Symbian web browser doesn’t have many frills, it will fit text into a screen. And with the accelerometer, the N86 supports landscape mode. However, surfing in landscape is slightly tedious. The N86’s vertical keypad means you have to straighten the phone before we could type in a new URL. In the App section, there is also a Youtube and Facebook portal.

The phone has a dedicated Ovi Store portal. The premise is simple, much like Apple’s app store. It has a good amount of apps, which should please app fanatics. The N86 has the N-Gage portal, and there quite a number of trial games available. like the Ovi Store, the N-Gage sells dedicated games for your N86.

Onboard GPS is available in the N86, and is powered by Nokia Maps 3.0. Ovi Maps offers four different view modes including satellite and hybrid maps.

Multimedia

The Nokia N86 has the S60 music player, as usual, your music library is automatically sorted by artist, album, genre and composer and searching tracks is available. You can also create your own playlists. Adding music is noticeably simpler in the N86- the phone automatically refreshes your music list the instant the microSD is slot inside. Choosing the refresh option will also add tracks into the library.

The dedicated multimedia keys made playing our video and audio files much easier. And there are buttons to play/pause, stop, forward and rewind.

The S60 audio quality is good and but not exceptional, at lower volumes the speakers perform well but once we turn in up the volume tends to shake up the entire handset. Guess we can’t have everything, and a loud volume point does not mean lower quality music.

The Nokia N86 features Real player for playing your video clips. The video player can be displayed in both normal and fullscreen modes. When in full screen, the softkey functions are hidden so that they don't spoil the viewing experience and only pop up when a key is pressed. The FM radio on Nokia 5800 has a nice simple interface and can automatically scan and save the available stations in your area. RDS support is included and the Visual radio is also on-board.

Connectivity

The Nokia N86 has a great selection of connectivity, with quad-band functionality (850 /900 /1800 /1900 MHz) with 3.6Mbps HSDPA, EDGE, GPRS, and Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP. There is also Wi-Fi.

Camera

The Nokia N86 is powered by an 8 megapixel, 3264x2448 pixels, wide 28mm Carl Zeiss lens, autofocus, dual LED flash. The picture quality is surprisingly average however, as photos come out slightly blurry and the colours feel a little unnatural at times. We also noticed some white outs when shooting out in the sun.

The wide angel lens does means the N86 can physically capture more of the background. But, we do have a little qualm with the macro shots as an object has trouble being focused. Another qualm is the lack of a quick camera key or the ability to access the camera from inside the phone. The only way to turn on the camera is to slide open the protective cover from the back.

The kickstand will automatically bring up the gallery by default, and pictures can be viewed in both portrait and landscape mode. It will also zoom up to 400%. There is also video recording running at 30fps. There’s a vanity camera throw in there for 3G calls.

Verdict

The Nokia N86 in the end gave us mixed feelings about its main hardware upgrade – the camera. The phone carries a heavyweight camera but the picture quality could be better. In the multimedia area however, the N86 does not falter. Combined with the connectivity options, and N-gage, this phone should keep even the neediest of us entertained.

Ultimately, the Nokia N86 falls back as a multimedia device for us rather than a camera centric-phone. At RM 1,880.00 this puts the phone at mid-range pricing. The N86 is recommended for those who love a slider form factor with great multimedia options, and the ability to snap pictures.