Mar 19 2009

Nokia N85 Review Part 1: Introduction & Package contents

Posted by Christian Titze in N-Gage, N-Series, N85, Nokia, OVI, Review, Unboxing

Introduction

The Nokia N85 was announced at a virtual event held by Nokia on the 26^th August 2008. This was about half a year ago, but now we finally got our hands on this black diamond.

Looking at it features, the device is very similar to N95, but it also has the design and gaming-features of the N81. So you can say the N85 is a mixture between both. A new thing, which we haven’t seen in a Nseries-device before, is the 2.6″ OLED-screen. This technology promises that black now finally is really black (which means that it is darker than in the screens before), it needs less battery and the colors are closer to the reality. However, the N85 does have a big amount of features, to name just a few: FM-transmitter (to stream your music from your mobile phone straight to your radio), 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss Optics and dual-LED flash, VGA video recording at 30 frames per second, dualslider (known from the N95), S60 3^rd Edition Feature Pack 2 and W-Lan.

This are just a few features, of course the N85 can do more things. It can do almost everything the N96 can do – and this in a smaller form-factor and with a lower price.

But is the N85 a good device and how does it perform in all-day usage? This review will find it out!

Package contents

As known from many other Nseries devices the N85 also comes with a box full of contents for an everyday multimedia-user. Starting with the handset itself and a powerful 1200 mAh battery over a TV-out cable to a headset with remote-control, the small box contains everything to get started.

Let’s start with a list of all the package contents:

Nokia N85
Battery (BL-5K)
Charger (AC-10)
Video Connectivity Cable (CA-75U)
USB-Cable (CA-101)
Headset, Remote Control (HS-45, AD-54)
8 GB microSD card (MU-43)
User Guide
Quick Start Guide
OVI sheet
N-Gage sheet with one activation code

A new thing is the charger, which charges the phone via the USB-connector. Unfortunately you can’t charge the N85 with your computer via USB. One positive aspect of this new charger is the fact that the whole phone just has one micro-USB port for all the things you need – this looks much better than having many individual connectors.

The headset with its remote control ist the usual Nseries headset which has standard audio-quality, nothing special here.

The N85 is available with 8GB of memory, this doesn’t mean the internal memory but the microSD memory card. Actually it’s a microSD HC card. One thing I miss is the SD-card adapter, so the user needs to use the USB-cable to save data to the memorycard – or buy an adapter for microSD cards.

The included video connectivity cable lets you connect your device to a TV to show all the things on it.

As usually the the device comes with lots of sheets, a PC Suite CD and manuals. However, the normal manual has decreased very much, there are just about 60 pages left. There are two sheets in the box: One about the N-Gage features of your N85 and the other about the OVI services by Nokia. On the back of the N-Gage sheet there’s an activation code for a game (you can choose one of the ten which are already pre-installed as trial’s on the phone).