My time with the N81 8GB Special Edition is practically up and I got one sentence to sum it up. I have fallen in love with this sucker! It doesn’t have the best camera optics or a huge gorgeous screen, it doesn’t have an accelerometer or a TV-out feature, it doesn’t have GPS or HSDPA, but for now I don’t even need or care about half of these. If it wasn’t for the bigger internal memory, I would’ve sworn I almost didn’t miss the N95 8GB all that much. It’s a personal opinion, I know and I am sure many people out there will completely-totally-utterly disagree with me. Well I guess they say that when you’re in love, you don’t see the bad sides. So no, I can’t notice the squeaky parts or the cheap plastic or all the lacks I mentioned above.
As the price tags go in Lebanon right now, the N81 8GB retails for 370$ whereas the N95 8GB retails around 700$, that’s double the price! The way I see it is that the N81 is a good camera, much more impressive than my 3250 that carries the same lousy 2MP: I believe the Carl Zeiss optics make the difference especially for close shots (no macro mode but it works well enough). This is an awesome music player, even without the Bose QC3. It’s a great gaming device and the N-Gage pre-release promises great future. It runs S60 3rd Edition FP1, which means a huge catalog of freeware and 3rd-party software. It has WLAN which guarantees some free internet on-the-go. In short, I think the N81 8GB is one of the best priced devices on the market. Yes I admit it, I want to buy one!
Full N81 8GB Special Edition coverage: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6.
[Picture Courtesy of The Symbian Blog]
