The Nokia N81 is a

Symbian OS Symbian is a discontinued mobile operating system (OS) and computing platform designed for smartphones. It was originally developed as a proprietary software OS for personal digital assistants in 1998 by the Symbian Ltd. consortium. Symbian OS ...

smartphone A smartphone is a portable computer device that combines mobile telephone and computing functions into one unit. They are distinguished from feature phones by their stronger hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems, whic ...

announced by

Nokia Nokia Corporation (natively Nokia Oyj, referred to as Nokia) is a Finnish multinational telecommunications, information technology, and consumer electronics corporation, established in 1865. Nokia's main headquarters are in Espoo, Finland, i ...

on 29 August 2007 and released the next month. It runs S60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 1. The N81 was marketed as an entertainment device focused on music and gaming. It was the first device that came preloaded with the N-Gage 2.0 gaming service in 2008 (albeit in public beta), and it features two dedicated gaming keys that can be used for N-Gage games (this would later also appear on the N96, N85 and 5730 XpressMusic). During the launch of N-Gage 2.0, the N81 was specifically chosen by Nokia in advertisements. It was also much marketed as a music-centric smartphone and was one of the first to support the

Nokia Music Store MixRadio was an online music streaming service owned by Line Corporation. The service was first introduced by Nokia in 2011 as ''Nokia Music'' for Windows Phone, serving as a successor to Nokia's previous Nokia Music Store/Comes with Music/Ovi ...

service. It has stereo speakers that are considered to be very loud. Several reviewers have claimed that the N81 has, much like the older

Nokia N91 The Nokia N91 is a smartphone produced by Nokia as part of their Nseries line of portable devices. It was announced on April 27, 2005 along with N70 and N90 as the first three Nseries devices. The N91 ran on Symbian-based S60 3rd Edition (the ...

, a very high sound output quality and therefore highly suitable for

audiophile An audiophile is a person who is enthusiastic about high-fidelity sound reproduction. An audiophile seeks to reproduce the sound of a piece of recorded music or a live musical performance, typically inside closed headphones, In-ear monitors, open ...

s. The four-way silver-coloured

D-pad A D-pad (short for directional pad or digital pad; officially referred to by Nintendo as a +Control Pad) is a flat, usually thumb-operated, often digital, four-way directional control with one button on each point, found on nearly all modern vid ...

below the display also contains a new capacitive sensor called the Navi wheel, which allows scrolling in the S60 gallery and music player applications by 'stroking' the key, in a similar manner to the

iPod click wheel The iPod click wheel is the navigation component of non touch-screen iPod models. It uses a combination of touch technology and traditional buttons, involving the technology of capacitive sensing, which senses the touch of the user's fingers. Th ...

. It is a unique feature that rarely appears on mobile handsets. The Navi wheel would later also appear on other Nokia

Nseries The Nokia Nseries was a high-end lineup of feature phones, smartphones, and tablets marketed by Nokia Corporation from 2005 to 2011. The Nseries devices commonly supported multiple high-speed wireless technologies at the time, such as 3G, or Wirel ...

handsets: N78, N85 and N96. Other than these the N81 has more modest specifications compared to the

Nokia N95 The Nokia N95 is a smartphone produced by Nokia as part of their Nseries line of portable devices. Announced in September 2006, it was released to the market in March 2007. The N95 ran S60 3rd Edition, on Symbian OS v9.2. It has a two-way sli ...

, with a 2-megapixel camera, lacking both

GPS The Global Positioning System (GPS), originally Navstar GPS, is a satellite-based radionavigation system owned by the United States government and operated by the United States Space Force. It is one of the global navigation satellite sy ...

and

HSDPA High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) is an amalgamation of two mobile protocols—High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) and High Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA)—that extends and improves the performance of existing 3G mobile telecommunic ...

, and weighing 20 grams heavier. However the N81 did have an

ARM11 ARM11 is a group of 32-bit RISC ARM processor cores licensed by ARM Holdings. The ARM11 core family consists of ARM1136J(F)-S, ARM1156T2(F)-S, ARM1176JZ(F)-S, and ARM11MPCore. Since ARM11 cores were released from 2002 to 2005, they are no lon ...

369 MHz processor, the fastest on a Nokia device at the time. The Nokia N81 notably features a sliding

spring-loaded A spring is an elastic object that stores mechanical energy. In everyday use the term often refers to coil springs, but there are many different spring designs. Modern springs are typically manufactured from spring steel, although some non ...

physical keylock on the top of the device, located next to the 3.5 mm jack. It is the first Nseries device that swapped the

miniUSB The initial versions of the USB standard specified connectors that were easy to use and that would have acceptable life spans; revisions of the standard added smaller connectors useful for compact portable devices. Higher-speed development of t ...

port in favour of

microUSB The initial versions of the USB standard specified connectors that were easy to use and that would have acceptable life spans; revisions of the standard added smaller connectors useful for compact portable devices. Higher-speed development of t ...

. A variant called N81 8GB with 8-gigabytes of internal flash memory was also announced at the same time. This version retailed for 430 euros before taxes, 70 euros more than the standard version which requires a microSD memory card to expand its 12 megabytes of storage. N81 would be succeeded by the N85.

Reception

The Nokia N81 had a lower sound output compared to the N91 due to the release of the new firmware version. According to Nokia, they must follow an international standard wherein a device's initial or default volume must be set too low to cause any damage to its users. CNET found it buggy, slow, and badly designed."Review", CNet, http://reviews.cnet.com/cell-phones/nokia-n81-8gb-unlocked/4505-6454_7-32581816.html S21 gave it 3/5, praising its feature set, while again criticising the "plasticky" design. However its musical capabilities have been highly praised.

References

{{Nokia phones N-Gage (service) compatible devices Nokia Nseries Mobile phones introduced in 2007 Slider phones