3 January 2008

Nokia N82 -:- User Review

Nokia N82 Has Amazing RAM

The Nokia N82, compared with the N95 has just an incredible amount of RAM with a massive 128MB of SDRAM and after a fresh bootup, you have around 93.5MB of Free Executable RAM Memory to play with. The device is very stable, even on an early firmware version (v10.0.046 24-10-07) it is incredibly very stable. The Nokia N95 with latest v20 firmware, you have around 28MB of Executable Free RAM to use.

I haven't experianced any freezing or locking up or any random restarts at all for the whole time ive had this device (about 20 days now) that is 20 days of heavy usage, like i said at start of review, i put the N95 away in the cupboard and used this N82 for my main phone. This is best way to try the device i think, as you use it as you would your normal phone.

So of course this ment installing all my faverote application and games to it also, but i did try to just use all defualt ROM applications to see how i would get on, or how long i would last lol, and it was not very long atall before i was installing the great x-plore application from lonely cat games. This simply a must have application in my opinion, and most symbian power users would definetly agree with me. The defualt Nokia file manager just doesn't cut it with very limited options, and a very basic user interface, id recomend everyone to purchase a copy of x-plore, great application.

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The N82 works great with the Nokia SU-8W Bluetooth keyboard, however, the Nokia wireless keyboard application doesnt come preinstalled to ROM memory, you must download the application from Nokia website before you can use your BT keyboard. I dont know why Nokia left this application, but maybe it will be added in next firmware release.

The N82 fits onto the small metal holder on the SU-8W and sits there very well indeed, it is a perfect fit, almost like the holder on the keyboard was actually made for the Nokia N82, which is much better than how the Nokia N95 sits on the keyboard in landscape mode, ie: with the media keys exposed, and also the Nokia N95 is slightly thicker than the N82. The only problem i did notice with the Nokia N82 on the Bluetooth keyboard, was the auto rotate situation with the device failing to rotate the screen on the homescreen, which i talked about earlier in the review.

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I also tested the TV out feature, which works exactly same as the Nokia N95, nothing has changed on the N82 on the TV-out, but i made some images and a short video to show you it in action on my big 52" samsung HD Television.

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Due to the size of my television, the output isnt that brilliant which is expected from QVGA resolution output, and VGA output on video and images, but the video plays quite surprisingly well via the TV-Out,, i made a short video to demostrate.

I was very impressed with the quality of the mp4 files over TV-Out, which outputs to the TV at VGA resolution (640 x 480) but the menu and everything else is output at QVGA (320x240) accept photos which are output at VGA also.

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I also like very much that the 3.5m headhpone jack, which also doubles as the TV-Out, is located at the top of the Nokia N82, next to the power button.

I Think this is a much better location for it, and should be here on all nokis devices. Where it is found on the Nokia N95 is just a joke, which is on the left hand side, this is just completly crazy place to put this 3.5m jack on N95, and i just dont know what Nokia were thinking when they decided to put it here. For example, listen to music on the N95 while doing some work with the SU-8W bluetooth keyboard? this becomes impossible or very difficult, due the 3.5m jack being located on the bottom of the device when your in landscape mode, making the N95 not sit properly on the Nokia SU-8W keyboard. It doesnt sit there very nice without the headphones connected, this just makes it even worse. I never know what goes through the minds of the Nokia design team sometimes.

I also spend a couple hours on the Nokia N82 trying use up all the RAM lol, and i found it quite impossible task. I was actually able to open Every Single ROM application on the device, and a some 3rd party applications also, and it still ran very stable. Over 70+ applications running over TV-Out. Check out the video.

As you can see, i opened ever single ROM application in the Nokia N82, and a few 3rd party application also, and phone was still very happy to continue to function as normal, and also with an amazing 23MB of free executable memory still left. That is just very impressive i think, let me put into perspective.. I opened over 70 (i think 73,i didnt count exact) different applications in the N82, and phone still stable, no freeze, no lock up, just as normal.

This is all due to the amazing ODP, or also known as demand paging (On Demand Paging) this has brought some amazing advantages to our Nokia symbian smartphones, those pesky anoying "error memory low, close some application" pop up messages we were all so very familier in the Nokia N95-1 (classic) post firmware version 20.0.015 as this also brought ODP into our Nokia N95 devices, and as most people know, it was so very much needed, as multitasking 2 application was hard, 3 became impossbile, but now the new v20 N95 firmware is like having a whole different device.

Again, this is due to the great ODP Nokia has implemented into there devices. ODP, or demand paging is an application of virtual memory, the operating system copies a disk page into physical memory only if an attempt is made to access it, so pages that are never accessed will never be loaded, which saves the memory for other programs. So its only loading the page you want to look at that point, and not having to load the whole program / application into memory, which is what happens in devices without ODP technology implimented, which keeps free a hell of a lot more RAM, which is why i was able to open all those applications in the video above, as even though those applications were open and running in the background, becuase i wasent actually using any of them at all, they were not needing any RAM, or very little RAM to just keep open in the background.

A device with demand paging will also bootup a whole lot faster than a device without it. The Nokia N82 fully boots around 4 to 5 seconds quicker than the Nokia N95, which is expected due to much more RAM that the N82 has over the N95.

Both N95 and N82 are running on the same chipset, both are powered by the texas instrument’s OMAP2420 which incorporates the PowerVR MBX 2D/3D graphics core and fully programmable VGP vertex processor core licensed by TI from Imagination Technologies altogether with the ARM11 332 MHz processor. So just like the N95, the N82 also has the 3D Graphics HW Accelerator, which is just great for mobile 3D gaming, proper REAL 3D graphics, not like the fake 3D we had with the old ngage devices.

But unfortunatly, we are still not seeing many good games that take full advantage of this great technology, the 1st device with this graphics chip was the Nokia n93, and still some few years later, were yet to see the true power of what this can do, we are only seing it on benchmarking demo applications, and yet to see any real game to take full advantage of the OpenGL ES (1.1), however there is one game which is very nice, and uses the 3D graphics Accelerator which is called Global Race. This is a great game and the FPS is just amazing, it is a racing car game, and if you own a N82 or N95 i strongly recomend to install this game, it is completly free also.

.:[ Nokia N82 - Technical Specifications ]:.