The Nokia N95 by all means and purposes is one of the most full featured Nokia phone that has ever come out from Nokia’s woodwork. With GPS, a 5 megapixel camera, cool multimedia functions and even a 3.5mm jack, it had almost everything you’d look for in a phone. Well except the fact that not everyone liked the N95’s shape and design. Well with Nokia’s N82, Nokia has now given us a phone that rivals the N95 but this time in candy bar format. Well we managed to get our hands on the N82 and so read on to see what our take on the phone was like.

Design

I'm a candy bar phone kind of a person, which made the N82's candy bar design perfect for me. Measuring at 4.4 x 2 x 0.7 inches, it fitted perfectly into the palm of my hands and had that solid feel to it. The size of the phone was neither too big or too small and was to me had the perfect width and feel. It was kind of light though not so light that you would think it was a toy phone. The N82 comes housed in a sleek, silvery chassis, which at first glance looked as if it was metal. However, after getting a feel of the phone, I was disappointed that that silvery sheen on the phone wasn't really metal but plastic. Of course that didn't mean the build quality was bad though as the N82 still felt solidly built to me, it's just that I'd like to see Nokia come up with a N-series phone with brush metal surfaces instead of being mostly made of plastic for once. Now as shiny as the front surface of the N82 was, it's bound to be a fingerprint magnet which was exactly what it became. Combined that with its generous 2.4" screen and well, you can imagine the amount of times I was wiping it down so it wouldn't look so grimy. Then again sometimes half the fun is in wiping the phone down, just so you can stare more at it.

The N82 has the hallmarks of Nokia user friendly and intuitive design. The function key placements were, what I would say, in the most logical of places, making the N82 really easy to use and didn't require you to actually take out the manual. One thing that bothered me a bit though was the size of the N82's number keypad. The other keys on the phone were generous in size from the menu button to the receive and reject call buttons. However, the number keypads were a different matter as they were quite small. Now as I said before, the N82 is not really a small phone which meant that it had ample space for bigger keys. However, I guess Nokia, for the sake of giving the N82 a creative design, gave the phone smaller keys reminiscent of the Sony Ericsson W880i keys. For a guy with big hands and thumbs like me, it took me a while to get used to the keys. Fortunately though, Nokia did space the number keys out a bit which meant I didn't really end up accidentally pressing the wrong number keys often.