Phone upgrade Nokia 6120c to N82

Time for an upgrade. I have been using the Nokia 6120c as my main phone now for nearly a year and it has been a mixed blessing. The camera is useless, the memory is limited, the speaker turns off at random points and you have to reboot to get it back, it gets confused and won't make a data connection on times. On the good side it is running S60 which is a pretty nice OS. It may look a little dated next to an iPhone but I quite like it.

I have been looking at reviews of all the new phones that have been coming out and I think that the N85 is one of Nokia's best so far. I can't wait to see how the N97 turns out but for now the N85 is the one to get.

So I brought a N82.

A couple of reasons drew me that way. The first was cost. You can get a N82 for less than £170 on ebay while the N85 is still over £300. The second and this was the main one for me, it has a Xeon flash. I have been really annoyed with the 6120c camera for some time now so I think that I wanted the best camera I could on the next phone.

I decided some time ago that I would get another S60 phone as I really like the OS and the community that it has. Nokia are doing great things with their beta labs and most mobile applications that create.

Right now I have the following running and in RAM with still 40Mb free.

Web Browser - I quite like the standard webkit based browser and by default it is opened when you click on a link in other applications.
Web Server - Just 'cause I can. It is a cut down version of Apache and you can visit it at http://choffee.mymobilesite.net
Music Player - It works okay. It has problems reading some tags but it works nicely with all the buttons. Ogg support would be nice.
Fring - Mobile IM. Google chat, msn, jabber, and Skype support. Sending files and VoIP. This runs all the time.
Contacts - It's just running right now.
File Manager - I used it to install an app uploaded from my PC earlier and it just still running. It's basic but it does the job.
Swim - This is a bit of a fix that runs the sync to http://scheduleworld.com/ with all my contacts and calendar. This should be part of the base os if you ask me.
n-Gage - Play server. I have tried a couple of games and they are pretty impressive. Using the camera to look around a virtual room is quite cool. But I don't really play that many games.
Shozu - For automating picture uploading. It just runs in the background, when you take a photo it pops up and says "Upload this?" you press yes or no and it goes away and deals with it.
?T9Nav - This is new but at the standby screen if you start typing as though you where entering text eg. 5646 it will search your contacts, apps, bookmarks, images, videos, calendar entries and music and give you list of things to choose from. I think this could be a keeper app.
Nokia Image Exchange - This just syncs your photos with an online site. It is dynamic so if you change a picture name on your phone or the web that info is reflected on both sides. It's from Nokia Beta Labs and has some rough edges but I quite like it.
JBakTaskMan - A little task manager that give you a list of running apps and some shortcuts and some important OS stats such as memory.

All that and I still have 50Mb of RAM free for things like the light saber that is controlled by the way you move the phone, tetris, frozen bubble with phone movement support, twitter apps if you don't like fring to handle that and many other apps that I have not mentioned here.

It's got GPS built in and it pretty quick taking only a few seconds to pick up a signal and 10 or so to get a fix. I would imagine this would be a little slower if you don't have internet access for it to get the A-GPS info. I had some fun with Nokia maps the other day which is pretty good for giving driving directions. I like the fact that I can use Google Maps and it's mega powerful local search to find somewhere, save that as a favorite in google maps then load Nokia maps and have it available to navigate to. I probably won't pay Nokia for Driving directions when my trial runs out in three months but I shall try to use it as much as possible until then.

The N82 does have some bad points. I think that I have mentioned before that I don't like the headphones at the top because as you get the phone out of your pocket or bag it is always up the wrong way. It does have the same charger as other modern Nokia phones but the USB connector is some crappy micro version that is just a tiny little bit smaller than the ones that everybody else uses. Why would they do that? The 3G reception is still a bit flakey but I think that is a general problem with three in some areas as the change over to 2G is slow and drawn out. This is probably not helped by my office being clad in metal and having generally poor phone reception.

Generally it all works better on the N82 than the 6120c. A lot of the little niggles are gone. I can mount it as USB drive and manage music and podcasts without having to shutdown the whole phone. I can install loads of apps in the main memory without running out of space. I can run a lot of those apps at one time and not struggle for memory.

There is loads more to talk about but for now I will leave it there. There are loads of other reviews of this phone on the web so I won't add to that noise a great deal. I may post some more on the apps that I like. Nokia is struggling to get an app store in the same way the iPhone does but there are some really good apps out there. You just have to look for them.

Did I mention that it can make phone calls as well?