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Overview:
N81 is one of the latest Nseries devices, It has this amazing slider that opens up the second you touch it, unlike the N95’s slider that requires continuous pushing, The N81’s front colour is black, and the back is sexy metallic brown, if it was all in brown or white, it would look a lot better.

The N81 is the first Nokia to have lots of things: Naviwheel, Enabling scrolling Music and Gallery by sliding your finger round the rim in both directions, The annoying thing is it’s not activated in factory settings and i bet a huge percentage of N81 users don’t know it really exists.
First Nokia to have a dedicated gaming keys also used for zooming in and out in Gallery,
First Nokia with a MicroUSB port, First Nokia “along with N95 8GB” to have the great looking but rather disappointing multimedia menu, and only nseries released in 07 that has the preview key removed.

The overall look of the device is good, but there’s a horrible cut in the front of the device, kinda makes the devive looks ugly and it’s consequences are more uglier, The Music keys along with the calling keys all look black from dust covering them, And when the backlight is on, they are barely seen.

I-Music Capabilities :

As usual, The thing that i start focusing it when i got the device was it’s Music capabilities, Having 8GB as Mass Memory, I didn’t transfer my N95 library to it, I connected it to my laptop and transferred every single track i got
It took me 2 freakin hours to transferred the 2.4GB to the N81, and frankly i blame the laptop for such delay  , After this Sync, The Music application went nuts! it became freakingly slow!! band thank god it was temporary and it returned to function properly in 5 minutes time.

The N81 is equipped with the bugfull latest edition of the Music application, And i am taking this review as an opportunity to remind Nokia with the tons of bugs in the application :

• When all songs belonging to a certain artist are deleted, The Artist’s name will still appear in the library
• When a song details are edited, there’s 50-50% chance that the edited data will be deleted in a while
• It links the album art to the picture in the gallery, meaning that if i updated a song’s album art and went to the gallery and deleted the corresponding picture, It’ll not show up when I play the song.
  While in the older music application, it used to save the album art(s) pics in a certain system directory
• The Most played, Recently Played and Recently Added Playlists are not accurate.

Another downside, the phone has lots of RAM, enabling Multitasking while listening to music, but technically it’s impossible, Music keys along with selection keys, Menu key, Clear key, Calling keys and let’s not forget the Naviwheel are squeezed in a very very small space, During my trialling, i wasn’t successful, not even once, in surfing the web, or browsing the gallery WITHOUT the song being paused, stopped , or the next/previous song played, Which is really frustrating.

The music application can’t be closed/exited, just like the N76 which is very annoying.

That doesn’t mean that this device isn’t meant for music, all these problems up there require a simple software update, except the keypad problem that requires MAJOR device redesigning.

In fact, This device is more than an iPod to a Phone for me, it is really dedicated for music and it stands out like an MP3 Player more than it does as a regular phone, It has an iPod like Naviwheel, making navigating the library more faster and simpler, It’s speakers are really loud, same as the N95’s, It has an amazing Lock switch on top, which is really better than the N91’s regular Lock key, After sliding the Lock key, it returns to it’s original position, The N81 has direct access to Nokia’s Music Store, enabling music purchase and downloading on the go.

The N81 along with the N76 brings the best Nseries Music experience, The dedicated music keys does have a great function, which is to pause/play and choose through songs at any time, without having to launch the music application.

Finally, A suggestion: Gaming keys are not usable during music playback, but it would be nice to see that for example, the circle key<lol enables/disables Repeat, and the box key enables/disables Music shuffling.