Hands On: Nokia N86

I got a chance to get some hands-on time with the just-announced Nokia N86.  Its headline feature is an 8 megapixel camera with a Carl Zeiss lens and a mechanical shutter.  The hardware is top notch down to the smallest detail.  The entire front of the device is tempered hard glass, there’s stainless steel around the rim as well.  The applications button down on the lower-left is also stainless steel, but Nokia has drilled miniscule holes in to ensure that it’s backlit and you can see it in the dark.  I was especially impressed with the 2.6″ OLED screen, which was very bright and crisp.  In short, Nokia spent quite a bit of time on the industrial design of the N86 and it shows.

Read on for more details and a photo gallery

The N86 also has 8 megs of on-board storage and can use microSD cards for further expansion.  It’s a two-way sliding device, giving you a keypad from one direction and 4 multi-function controls on the other.  The 4 buttons on the top-slide can either control your music, let you zoom in and our of photos, or act as gaming buttons for N-Gage games.

The real winner here has to be the camera.  The shuter is mechanical and the lens is flanked by two LED flashes.  It’s also a wide-angle lens, giving you more detail on the edges and in the background of your images.  The panoramic mode is also very impressive, the N86 displays a ’strip’ on the bottom with the previous images in your panoramic shot to help you line up where the camera should go next for it to automatically continue your panoramic shots.  

You can also see how well the camera performs under low-light conditions, Nokia had posters printed up at their booth of photos taken with the N86 around Barcelona.

Finally, the N86 has AGPS and it seems to work quite well, picking up a pretty decent location even from within the show hall.  Photos are geo-tagged and you can click in to Ovi Maps to see where the photo was taken or even get directions to that spot.  Ovi Maps also has the neat 3D view of buildings for certain areas.

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