I’ve been using the Nokia N80 (Internet edition) multimedia phone for the past two weeks and I love it.

It is very small (95.4 mm x 50 mm x 26 mm) and it has Wi-Fi, which I need desperately after receiving an unpleasant surprise in the form of a 250 EUR bill from my mobile provider, Orange (Netherlands). Most of the 250 EUR came from using my 3G data subscription to read email and surf the web a little bit while I was in Lisbon last month.

A warning to anyone who signs up for 3G data service: outside your country, the data roaming rates are even more outrageous than for voice. In the case of Orange, this amount is 15 EUR per megabtye! What are mobile operators and phone makers thinking — that people will upload/download video and photos via 3G? No way!

So Wi-Fi to the rescue! I downloaded Gizmo Project (a Skype-like application that allows you to make free or very cheap voice calls), so I can now can talk on this phone over a Wi-Fi network. But you do have to set up Gizmo Project by going to www.gizmovoip.com. If only there were citywide Wi-Fi everywhere (attention: go to my other site, muniwireless.com) . . .

But never mind, there’s a lot of Wi-Fi in the cities I visit so I reserve my Internet browsing and email reading for those moments when I have Wi-Fi access. If you have a Yahoo mail account it’s very easy to access it since the application is already downloaded onto the phone. With Gmail, you can download the app from Google’s website:
http://www.google.com/mobile/index.html

Since the N80 is a multimedia phone, it has a 3 megapixel camera that can take both photos and video. Check out the quality of the photos I took last week:
http://www.rosecantine.com/archives/227/

There are a few annoying things about the phone but perhaps I have not figured out how to optimize it. I configured the WLAN wizard so that the phone automatically scans for my home Wi-Fi network, but when I log onto my Gmail account, it still asks me if I want to scan Wi-Fi networks. Why doesn’t it just log onto the home network? Hmmm… From time to time, the phone freezes when trying to access a website via a Wi-Fi network. I have to reboot it by pressing the phone’s on/off button. Is this just version 0.005 of the Wi-Fi access functionality of this phone?

I am sure Anina has figured out more things about the N80 and other Nokia multimedia phones since she’s a mobile phone diehard. Go to www.anina.net where you will see her Lifeblog — lots of photo and video uploaded from Nokia phones. She was also the one who showed me how to set up Gizmo Project on the N80.

For other reviews of the Nokia N80, go to Engadget and Andy Abramson’s blog.

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