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The Nokia N80 is a high-end slide-style smartphone equipped with a 3 megapixel camera. Other great features include Bluetooth, a miniSD card slot, speaker-independent voice control, EDGE data, FM radio, and speakerphone.

Why is it that so many mobile phones are almost perfect, but none can quite achieve perfection? I'm not talking about "You can't please all of the people all of the time" type imperfection, either. I'm talking about design and functionality choices that leave me scratching my head and asking, "What were they thinking?"

The Nokia N80 is a perfect example of the incredible frustration caused by an almost perfect product. With a 3 megapixel camera, high-resolution display, Symbian OS, and built-in WiFI, the N80 looks to be the perfect phone — on paper. But once in hand, I found two of the N80's flaws, in particular, annoying enough to make me pull my SIM card and put the phone back in its box.

Granted, I took the N80's $599 retail price into account when considering said flaws. So don't get me wrong: the N80 is a seriously powerful device with alot going for it. But if you spent $600 on a mobile phone, you'd want perfection, too, right?

The N80 is a little brick of a cell phone. Measuring 95 x 50 x 26 mm, the all-black slider is half as thick as it is wide. This gives the handset what another review called a "short, stout" appearance. While the N80's footprint is relatively small, it's size and mass are more than noticeable in hand, let alone in a pants pocket. In an age of ever-thinner mobile handsets, the N80 is an anomaly for how thick it is.

The front panel of the N80 is largely given over to a roomy screen, which is one of the device's strong points. Above the display is a front-mounted VGA camera intended primarily for 3G video calls in Europe and Asia. Beneath the display, a directional pad is flanked by four buttons: left and right softkeys, Send, and Cancel. A row of four more keys - Edit, Menu, Multimedia, and Clear - lies beneath that. The front panel also slides upward to reveal a standard 12-button dialing keypad.

On the back of the phone, the 3MP camera sensor is housed along with a camera light and macro mode slider switch. The bottom portion of the back panel slides off to reval the battery and SIM card slots.

A single button on the top panel of the N80 controls power and profiles and sits adjacent to an infrared sensor, while the bottom panel houses separate AC adapter and Pop Port jacks. The left-side mounted miniSD memory card slot is covered with a plastic cap, and a dedicated camera button is found on the right side of the phone.

The N80's buttons are generally excellent, yielding good tactile feedback, with two exceptions. First, the directional pad lacks a center button, instead requiring the user to depress the entire pad to trigger the select command. This resulted in several annoying mis-hits during testing. Second, the top row of the dialing keypad is a little bit cramped as a result of the sliding mechanism and relatively thick top half of the phone.

Overall, the N80's design would be fine if it weren't so darned thick. The all-black look of the version I tested has a classy, all-business look to it, and the device is also available in silver. The length and width of the handset are great, and the slider mechanism works well. But the N80 is just too thick for me. While it does pack quite a bit of functionality, I think Nokia would have done well to take a cue or two from Samsung's slider phones and make the phone a little longer and wider for the sake of shaving a good 5mm or so off of its depth. As it is now, the N80 really feels like a brick in a jacket or pants pocket. Forgive my obvious bias here, but that's a deal-breaker for me when we're talking about a $600 cell phone that doesn't have a QWERTY board.

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nokia n80

Pros: Symbian 3rd edition O.System

Cons: everything!! just got this phone 1month ago, and tryed to love it for the price i spent, BUT phone stinks, sliders cool but works like a dummy phone, no spring nothing, you need to push it up or down, slider VERY loose, expect unexspected hangups just picking up the phone, system crashes and resets, takes forever to power up. signal is terrible, and you sound muffled on the outher end. bluetooth does Not keep recent logs, outhers always have to switch to find me, battery life

Summary: nice looking great pictures but all together not worth the price, This phone is better used as a Paper weight.

16 out of 33 people found this review helpful