First impression: Nokia N82
November 15, 2007

Mobil Magazine has had a chance to preview the N82. It is Nokia's most advanced camera mobile ever. A real flash, N-gage games and faster photos are among the improvements.

Camera starts when lens cap is moved.

The camera feature starts as soon as you push the lens cap aside.

The camera takes 5-megapixel images, but Nokia's phones have often been somewhat slow starters. That has been improved now, and from getting the phone out of the pocket until the shot is taken is now reduced some second. It feels like it is the camera start-up and the image file save times that have been reduced.

The camera on the backside does actually not have an icon in the menus. Instead, the camera is activated by the lens cap on the back side. There is a real flash that gives a good light. It shines brighter than those LED lights previously used by Nokia. A red light is used to ease and speed up the focusing, which is useful when there is little light.

Photography using the N82 spontaneously feels good, but we have to test more to give a final statement. A good thing is the blog feature for when having taken pictures, by a click on an icon that looks like a globe, the image is automatically uploaded to an account at the image site Flickr, or to Vox, supporting both video and images.


Since the N82 has a flash instead of a light, there is no lamp for shooting videos. On the other hand, the N82 records videos at a relatively high resolution (VGA - 640x320 pixels) and if the light is not sufficient, there is a night mode to improve sensitivity.

Thanks to a sensor in the phone, the screen orientation is changed depending on the way you hold the phone. This works well and in addition fast in almost all of the installed programs. It works the best in the web browser and the media player.

The GPS antenna is at the top, intended to make the reception better. In combination with assisted GPS to get a faster position fix. The N82 also has the new version of Nokia Maps, and maps of the local area is included on the 2Gb memory card. More maps are available at no charge from Nokia.com. To use the GPS program is also free of charge, but if you want to use the navigation feature while driving, you have to pay an extra annual fee. Nokia had the same solution for the N95.

The keypad on the N82 has a new design with long, slim and small buttons. The top-down spacing between the buttons is quite alright, but left-to-right the buttons are a bit too closely placed. The shortcut to the media menu is to the right of the navigation button, but there are no short cut buttons to control music. However, the music player is reached by one click on the start screen.

There is a 3.5 mm earphone plug on the front side. On the side, there is a micro USB connection to hook up to the desktop computer, and a standard Nokia charger plug.

The Nokia N82 will be on sale starting already November.

By: Erik Mörner, Linus Brohult