haivu wrote:

Thank you Zack for your excellent review. I have been pondering buying this phone for some time now. After reading the review, I have a few questions that I hope Zack and other N80 owners can answer.

1. Can the phone, as a PDA, connect to a WIFI network that has WEP protection?
2. Can we sync over WIFI?
3. Can we play protected WMA? I frequently check out audio books in this format and it would be nice if I can bring just the phone to the gym instead of both phone and MP3 player.
4. I heard a user comment from CNET that the phone crashes too frequently, do you have any comment regarding this?
5. What are the competitors to this phone?

Thanks.
Hai

It worked with my 802.11b router with WEP and my 802.11g router with WPA2 just fine. I don’t think iSync will work over wifi, and I didn’t try the Nokia PC suite because I don’t own a PC.
There is no WMA support at all.
The phone itself was very stable, and the only program that consistently crashed was the web browser. I think it’s too advanced!

I think the main competitors of this phone are the Windows Mobile smartphones made by HTC. To be honest, a Windows Mobile smartphone or Pocket PC phone is better for this price point. If the Treo 700w didn’t have such a terrible screen, I definitely would have bought one instead of a 700p. Symbian OS 9 has almost no third party software and the process to get software certified is too restrictive for this to change in the near future.

1. Can the phone, as a PDA, connect to a WIFI network that has WEP protection?
2. Can we sync over WIFI?
3. Can we play protected WMA? I frequently check out audio books in this format and it would be nice if I can bring just the phone to the gym instead of both phone and MP3 player.
4. I heard a user comment from CNET that the phone crashes too frequently, do you have any comment regarding this?
5. What are the competitors to this phone?

Thanks.
Hai

However, wouldn’t the E70 be more your style?

http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_e70-review-96.php

It’s on my list as next phone right now.

Smaller, same OS, but gives me the qwerty keyboard. I played with one in a cellphone shop last week. It’s very very nice. Solid build. *Gorgeous* screen.

Wifi, BT, egde, etc.

It is close to $450 most places though…..yowch.

Experiment626 wrote:

Hi Julie!

Great review of the N80 Zack!

Hey I have a quick question: the main problem with the N80 when using Wifi is its tiny screen. Would it be possible to use the N80’s wifi connection in order to get a Bluetooth-enabled PDA that doesn’t have built-in wifi (e.g., Palm Tungsten T3) to connect to an open Wifi access point?

In this situation, the N80 would serve as a “pass-through” device which would connect to the access point via Wifi and pass on the signal to the T3 via Bluetooth. Would this work at all?

There weren’t any options to share any of the network connections to any of the other ones. There wasn’t an option to use a Bluetooth network connection for the internet, either. It would be really cool if it could be a little Wifi-Bluetooth bridge, but it can’t do that out of the box. A third party program might be able to do it, but I’m pretty sure that there isn’t a program like this out there.

The screen is certainly very small. The web browser will zoom out enough that most content can be seen in a single column, but the text is utterly illegible. Near the end of my time with the phone, I started using Opera Mini instead.

Great review of the N80 Zack!

Hey I have a quick question: the main problem with the N80 when using Wifi is its tiny screen. Would it be possible to use the N80’s wifi connection in order to get a Bluetooth-enabled PDA that doesn’t have built-in wifi (e.g., Palm Tungsten T3) to connect to an open Wifi access point?

In this situation, the N80 would serve as a “pass-through” device which would connect to the access point via Wifi and pass on the signal to the T3 via Bluetooth. Would this work at all?

http://www.the-gadgeteer.com/review/nokia_n80_smart_phone

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