The Nokia N-Gage may be a dead duck, but that mediocre phone and lacklustre handheld console did help bring mobile gaming into the mainstream. The N-Gage does live on as a gaming platform along the lines of Xbox Live though, and is integrated seamlessly into Nokia’s latest N81 handset, along with 8Gb of memory and a powerful music player.

The N81 is a fairly chunky handset with a large 2.4in, 320x240 (non-touch) screen. The keypad slides out from the bottom half, so there’s plenty of room for large number keys and shortcut buttons. Particularly useful are the music control buttons around the directional keypad that let you play, pause and skip tracks without having to first load the music program.

Unfortunately, the keypad can only be described as “nasty”. The directional keypad, number buttons and music controls are all made of a cheap feeling and creaky plastic, which makes it tricky to press the right key. The whole phone feels cheap, and its build quality is not a patch on some of Nokia’s other handsets, like the E65 or N95.

This is a shame, as the phone’s operating system is fast and easy to use. The N81 runs the Series 60 3rd Edition OS and while this can feel sluggish on older phones, the N81 seems powerful enough to cope.

The menus open smoothly and applications run quickly, even when several are open. Series 60 is a multitasking operating system, so you can have several applications open at once. We noticed little slowdown, even with several programs open. 

The N81’s main focus is music and gaming. The music player program is the equal of Sony Ericsson’s mobile Walkman application, and lets you sort music by artist, album or genre and create playlists.

Getting music onto the phone is easy. You can copy music straight onto the memory card in Windows, synchronise your tunes with Windows Media Player, or use Nokia’s own Music Manager program to encode music from CD and copy it to the phone. The supplied headphones are comfortable and sound reasonable, if a little harsh, but you can always plug your own pair into the phone or inline remote control (both have a 3.5mm socket).

Anyone with an Xbox 360 will be familiar with the layout of the N-Gage application. Once you’ve chosen a nickname and connected to the service, you can upload high scores, download new games or challenge other gamers to a match.

The N81 comes with demos of the Asphalt 3 racing game, FIFA 2008 and Brain Challenge, and it’s easy to download new games. It’s far simpler than the usual method of buying games with premium rate text messages, but there isn’t such a large choice of titles. Games look great on the vibrant high-resolution screen, though.

There are plenty of useful bundled applications, including a POP3 and IMAP4 email, a powerful calendar which can synchronise with Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express, and Nokia Maps.

Nokia Maps is similar to Google Maps, with one big exception – you can pre-load maps to the phone for free with Nokia’s MapLoader application, so you don’t have to download on the fly and eat into your data allowance. Maps you do download are cached on the handset for later use. The maps themselves are very detailed, but the application runs slowly, which is particularly noticeable when you’re scrolling around.

There are a couple of applications missing which we would have liked to see, however. Unlike many smartphones, the N81 can’t view Word or Excel documents, although it does have support for PDFs.

Like most Nokia smartphones, the N81 is well suited to browsing the web. The web browser is the most powerful available this side of the iPhone’s Safari, and renders mobile-optimised and normal web pages quickly and accurately. You navigate pages with a cursor rather than just scrolling through links, so it’s easy to click on the link you need.

The N81 renders web pages faster than other Series 60 3rd Edition phones we’ve seen, so surfing the web is a pleasant experience. The phone has built-in Wi-Fi too and it’s simple to connect with the wireless wizard. And of course there’s also 3G for when you’re not near a wireless hotspot.

Nokia’s N81 is in many ways an impressive phone. It has a fast interface, some powerful standard applications and a good web browser, and works well as a music player and gaming handset. It’s also good value and it’s just a pity that the handset feels so cheap. 

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