Nokia N85 review

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What is it: Smartphone with 5-megapixel camera

What we think: A good all-rounder, it looks lovely and it works well, although it's hardly revolutionary

Nokia N85 Review

Reviewed by: Andrew Lim

Reviewed on: 18 November 2008

From the model number, you'd think the N85 is a lesser version of the famous N95, but it's actually an upgrade. Is this a case of Nokia running out of ideas, or is it merely honing a deservedly popular phone? We took a good look at the N85 to see whether Nokia has cracked it again.

The N85 will be available soon for free on a monthly contract. Pricing has yet to be announced.

Design
The N85 is a solid-feeling slider phone that's smooth around the edges, giving it a more up-to-date feel than the blocky N95. Considering how many features it packs in, it doesn't feel chunky or too heavy.

Aside from the keypad, we found all the keys on the N85 well-designed and easy to press. There's even a handy toggle switch for locking and unlocking the N85 quickly. As for the keypad, we found it too flat for our liking, but not unusable.

We found the N85's keypad flatter than we'd like

The double sliding mechanism -- which moves around too much on the N95 -- feels more solid in the N85, and doesn't slide when it's in your pocket. Equally secure is the N85's camera cover -- again, it won't open by mistake in your trousers and take photos of your keys.

We really appreciate that Nokia has placed a 3.5mm headphone jack at the top of the phone instead of on the side, making it much less fiddly to use. You'll also be glad to hear that charging and connecting to a PC can all be done via a micro-USB cable.

Worth noting is the N85's OLED display, which consumes less power than a standard LCD. The screen is bright and large enough to view text messages or watch YouTube videos on. We also found that the Opera Mini browser looked superb on it.

Features
The N85 offers up some truly useful features, starting with HSDPA and Wi-Fi -- you can access the Web almost everywhere you go. The on-board browser works well enough, but we prefer using Opera Mini, which you can download for free and offers a neat way of viewing full Web pages.

Similar to the N95 and N96, the N85 is a dual sliding phone with dedicated media keys on one side

GPS means you can find your location and plan trips, using Nokia Maps, which comes pre-installed, or you can download Google Maps. We didn't have any problems picking up satellites, but as expected, the GPS doesn't work indoors.