The N86 is a premium segment phone from Nokia’s N series. This slider borrows many aspects of its predecessor, the N85. Dimensionally, its not exactly pocket-friendly – and weighing 149 grams, it feels a bit on the heavier side. The phone’s build is quite decent. The sliding mechanism’s smooth as well. Looks-wise, its probably not eye-candy, but it does look like its worth high moolah. The metallic frame around the front-face and the anti-scratch front surface bring in sturdiness to the phone. The 3.5mm  headphone jack’s placement at the top is convenient. The buttons on the phone overall are fairly tactile. People with large fingers may find the numpad and the media buttons to be somewhat small. We found the keypadlock switch on the side to be quite nifty.

The 2.6-inch AMOLED screen displays content quite nicely; colors appear richer and the size is big enough to act as a viewfinder for the 8 mega-pixel camera onboard. The sunlight legibility of the display isn’t great when sun rays are directly incident on it. An easy fix - slightly tilting the screen makes the content readable. The UI auto-rotate feature changes the screen orientation quickly; but it is not accurate all the time. It runs the Symbian OS 9.3 quite smoothly. There’s almost no lag except for the photo viewer app or when you’re using more than three apps at a time. The UI is quite easy-to-use, the help menus give out useful info about every function. The N86 8GB internal memory is adequately-large; plus there’s a microSD card slot for further expansion. But for a phone with a nifty kickstand, we wished the media player support popular video formats like DivX or XviD. The FM transmitter feature worked pretty well, as long as the phone was kept quite close to the receiver. There are a plethora of connectivity options: Wi-Fi, HSDPA (3.5G), A-GPS, Bluetooth and microUSB. We were disappointed with the datatransfer rates over USB – the speeds averaged at around 1.5 MB/s. The web-browser is supports full HTML pages and gives you an overview of the page and you can zoom into individual sections easily.

Let’s talk about the star feature of the phone; the camera. The day-shots turned out to be quite good. The noise was quite low. Photos looked very clear on a PC. The color reproduction was natural. Instead of a Xenon flash, Nokia decided to stick to the traditional dual-LED flash. But it does the job fairly well as it illuminated pitch-black environments to a decently viewable level. It records video quite smoothly at VGA resolution. Features like face detection and image stabilization were not available on this phone. The wideangle lens makes its use only in the panorama mode. It automatically takes sequential photos and stitches them into a wide-screened image. The phone comes preloaded with the N-gage application. It has a couple of games like Fifa 09, Prince of Persia etc. for trial. The media buttons can also be used as the A-B control buttons. Thus, you can play games like you would on your PSP. Although thanks to the average tactility of the buttons, it isn’t an entirely convenient experience. The N86’s got good network  reception and call quality. With regards to music, the provided in-earphones deliver a decent audio quality. The music player app arranges your songs according to artists, albums, genres, etc. The phone comes pre-loaded with a trial version of their turnby- turn navigation software. It currently has preinstalled maps of 8 major cities in India. Alternatively, one can use the freely-available Google Maps. It doesn’t take long for the phone to get a fix thanks to A-GPS. But the unit on the N86 had difficulty in maintaining a GPS fix. We’d rate the GPS performance above average. The app navigates pretty well and one could have used this phone as a dedicated GPS device; had the GPS fix been more consistent. TV-out is supported Wirelessly to compatible uPnP/ dlna devices and via cable. But unfortunately the cable isn’t provided in the package. Battery life is quite average. On heavy usage of the phone (GPS, FM  transmitter, Music etc.) the phone barely lasted a day. At over Rs. 27,000, the phone is priced a little  above 8MP camera-phones from competitors. The phone does deliver when it comes to its main feature -- the camera. But you’re paying quite a few thousand rupees for that jump from 5 MP to 8 MP. If the price does not scare you, and you’re looking for a good multimedia phone from Nokia, then the N86 just might deliver. 

 The N86 is a premium segment phone from Nokia’s N series. This slider borrows many aspects of its predecessor, the N85. Dimensionally, its not exactly pocket-friendly – and...