Nokia N82

If the N82 was at a high school prom, it would be the one that everyone was friends with, yet still the one sat slumped alone while all the other mobile phones slow danced.

With a chrome-like effect that is, on closer inspection, cheap and plasticy, the N82’s layout does it no favours whatsoever. The keys look malnourished and their thin rectangle shapes results in smarting fingertips if you press too hard. The navigational pads on the front of the phone are also a little cramped and prone to accidental pressing of the wrong key if you happen to have digits that are anything more than small to average.

While the screen is a fairly decent size (2.4in QVGA), Nokia could have made better use of the space on the handset, either to accommodate more screenage or to make the buttons bigger. The Nokia logo, for example, takes up around a cm of space height-wise. This all helps to make the phone’s design stand out … for the wrong reasons.

Beauty school drop out

Thankfully, beneath the ugly exterior lurks a beauty of a camera phone. With five whole megapixels on offer and a lens that’s protected by a little shutter switch, picture quality is high and frustration and hair-pulling moments are low.

With auto and manual focus options and a quality flash, it’s a breeze to use. We also like the fact that the buttons light up when using the camera in the dark – such a feature could prove invaluable at gigs. A word of caution, however: Take care when trying to take snaps of yourself in low-light settings as the red LED does its job a bit too well and might make your eyes hurt.

Hear, hear

Video fairs well and sound quality is excellent, picking up what our subject was saying despite being at the other end of a large room with no mic.

The UI is nice to use but the motion sensor used to flip between portrait and landscape modes suffers a tiny adjusting delay, which is a shame as we’ve seen better applications of this elsewhere.

The N82 doesn’t quite have the same wow factor as the N95. But, if you’re looking for a good quality camera phone to capture the moments you want to remember when you don’t have your fancy compact around, this could be the one for you.

They say: Storytelling rediscovered
We say: You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, especially when the cover is a bit rubbish.