Nokia N85 Review:

Design – Good

The Nokia N85 is a classic Nokia Nseries device, which means that it's shaped like a brick and packed with features. Nokia has managed to turn their stodgy old Eseries business phones into drool-worthy, stylish devices, starting with the Nokia E71x, and we hope the company's best designers will turn their attention to these Nseries phones soon. In any case, the Nokia N85 is not an unattractive brick, with curved edges and a glossy black paint job up front, but the design seems a hodge-podge of ideas, with an unappealing two-tone color scheme and loads of unnecessary seams and ridges.

Of course, once you turn on the Nokia N85, you might forget all about the boring design. Nokia phones have always had impressive displays, but the OLED screen on the N85 is among the most attractive phone screens we've seen. The resolution comes up a bit short at 240 by 320 pixels (QVGA), but even the aging Symbian S60 interface looks great on this screen. Text, icons and videos all look dazzling and colorful. The OLED screen is also noticeably brighter than other LCD screens we have in house, while at the same time maintaining deeper blacks for a more vibrant look.

Nokia could have done a better job with buttons and menu navigation on the phone. The Nokia N85 uses a center button with a touch sensitive rim. You can press in 4 directions, or you can circle the metal button with your finger to scroll. Unfortunately, this scrolling action didn't work everywhere on the phone. When it did work, it didn't seem very sensitive, and had a tendency to slow down or jump a bit as we circled the so-called Navi wheel button. Likewise, the buttons on the face could have been designed better. Besides the "Send" and "End" keys, the other buttons on the face jut too close to the edges of the device. A multimedia key seems stuck in the center of the face, an easy place to find it, but not the best design choice.

Calling – Very Good

Call quality on our Nokia N85 review unit was very good in our tests. The North American version uses AT&T's 3G networks for voice and data. Sound quality during calls was top notch. Our callers sounded clean and clear, and they reported the same quality on their end. Battery life was also very good. We were happy, but not blown away, by the 5 hours of talk time we got from the N85, even though that did exceed Nokia's promise of 4.5 hours. What impressed us more was the standby time. Nokia claims the phone can last 2 weeks on standby, but we let the phone sit an extra week and it still held enough of a charge to complete a call. Reception was also solid. The phone reported full bars as we roamed the greater Dallas metro area, and we held onto 3G data reception during our entire test period.

For contacts, we downloaded Nokia's Mail for Exchange app using the Downloads menu on the phone. Though MfE doesn't provide all the features you'll find on a Microsoft Windows Mobile phone, the app did a fine job synchronizing our contacts. If you don't use an Exchange account, the Nokia N85 can also synchronize contacts using the included Nokia PC Suite software. We also like the Log app on the phone, which keeps track of incoming and outgoing communications, including text messages and phone calls.

Otherwise, calling features were a bit mixed. The speakerphone was good, with a clean sound from the N85's stereo speaker, but we wish it could be a bit louder. Voice dialing was a disappointment. Like many Nokia phones, the Nokia N85 just can't get the voice recognition right. We tried again and again, but the speaker-independent app never once chose the right contact to call. For Bluetooth, we paired the Nokia N85 with our Plantronics Voyager Pro, and we were happy to find the Nokia N85 is smart enough to guess the correct PIN for Bluetooth headsets.

Messaging - Good

With a little push, the Nokia N85 can be a capable messaging device. The phone can send text and multimedia messages, obviously, and it also comes with a basic e-mail app. For more power, we downloaded Mail for Exchange, a free, over-the-air download from Nokia, and synchronized the phone with our Microsoft Exchange e-mail account. We didn't get full Exchange support. The phone couldn't display our Inbox subfolders, for instance. But for keeping tabs on our work messages, it hit the spot.

We wish there were more good messaging apps available for download from the Nokia Downloads app. The Social Networking link led only to a link for Fring, a service we've never used. We'd prefer Facebook, or perhaps even MySpace. There are also no instant messaging apps available. Because this is a Symbian S60 phone, there are plenty of 3rd party options out there for an intrepid user to find, but we always prefer when these apps are accessible through the phone. Is this our way of happily anticipating the upcoming Nokia Ovi store? Absolutely.

The worst part about messaging on the Nokia N85 is the keyboard. Almost a quarter of the keypad is taken up by strange ridges that seemingly guide the topmost slide into place. It's an ugly design element that makes the keypad much smaller. The keys themselves are also very slick, with no tactile breaks between the columns. Typing on the device was a chore.

Multimedia – Very Good

As a multimedia device, the Nokia N85 holds its own with the best. The interface on the music and video players could use a serious overhaul, but there's no arguing with the phone's capabilities. We synchronized some tunes using the Nokia PC Suite, then dragged some to the phone in mass storage mode, and the N85 found all of our tracks with no trouble. Music playback was very good. The phone has a nice set of stereo speakers on the side, and these were adequate for small room listening. What's more, the Nokia N85 is a dual-slider, so if you open the phone the other way, you get a vertical set of playback controls. These weren't entirely useful or necessary to us, but opening the phone this way did trigger an orientation switch from portrait to landscape mode. Too bad this couldn't have been handled by an accelerometer, instead.

Video playback on the device was also impressive. Our Nokia N85 review unit chewed up all the MP4 we threw at it, and had no trouble resizing VGA videos to fit the smaller display resolution. Videos looked superb on the phone's OLED screen, with no pixelation or stuttering. Colors were vibrant and motion was smooth, even during intense special effects scenes.

The Nokia N85 is a capable multimedia device in terms of hardware, as well. The phone features a 3.5mm headphone jack, so we could use our favorite earbuds, and it's placed smack in the center of the phone right on top, which let the device sit naturally in our pockets. If you don't want to use headphones, the Nokia N85 also uses stereo Bluetooth for wireless connections, and it even comes with an FM transmitter so you can play tunes over your car stereo. Outside of densely packed urban areas, the FM transmitter worked very well, and made a nice alternative to wired inputs.

The phone packs a whopping 8GB of internal storage, and Nokia has also generously included a microSDHC slot (hear that, Apple?), which means you can double the capacity with an 8GB card. The Nokia N85 is one of the first Nokia phones we've seen to skip the proprietary power adapter, and the phone instead charges and transfers data through a microUSB cable, which was a much more convenient option.

Web browsing – Very Good

Nokia Nseries devices have always included one of the best Web browsers on the phone market, and the Nokia N85 was no exception. Browsing the Web was a speedy experience over AT&T's fast HSDPA networks. When we wanted to throw up our hands and go faster, we switched to Wi-Fi and the browser raced along. Once pages were loaded, the browser handled them with aplomb. Layout was nearly flawless in every page we checked, and the browser scrolled through long pages very quickly, using the app's mini map as a guide. Going back and forth through the browser history was also a cinch with the page snapshots that the browser keeps in memory. Again, typing on the keypad caused some initial headaches, but once we had all of our bookmarks loaded, we were very pleased with the experience.

GPS Navigation – Very Good

The Nokia N85 gets GPS and turn-by-turn navigation courtesy of Nokia Maps. Included with the N85 is a 3-month trial of the Nokia turn-by-turn, voice guided navigation service. We liked Nokia's navigation, perhaps even more than we like the standard U.S. carrier options, such as VZ Navigator. The spoken directions were more clear, and phone did a fine job following us throughout our route. The Nokia Maps app also had no trouble finding points of interest on our trip, including some of our favorite local restaurants and dry cleaners.