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By Andrew Gould 26 November 2008

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Right, so if you’re the type of person who’s really up to date with happenings in the mobile world, and these days staying on top of that game is like watching a David Lynch movie – it’s impossible, then you will probably have heard that the Nokia N85 is supposed to be better than the Nokia N96.

Let’s just set the record straight, the N96 was ­supposed to ­improve on the N95, and it does. But now Nokia comes out with a cheaper phone that’s getting better reviews than the N96. It’s like the Nokia executives said: “Hey, let’s do something fun with this one, we’ll shoot ­ourselves in the foot by ­making a phone that ­competes with one of our ­current phones and then let’s sell it cheaper.”

The N85 comes out with a host of multi-media features that weigh up very well, when compared to its ­rivals in the class. The N85 has a ­brilliant 2.6\" OLED screen that is great for both games and video. The 5 megapixel ­camera is quite good, not ­incredible, despite having a “Carl Zeiss optics, Tessar lens”. This 5 megapixel ­camera is great to have, but you’re ­really not going to be able to take world class ­photos with it.

The N85, like some ­others out there, has a built-in ­accelerometer that can sense which ­orientation the screen is in, but this is ­really not a good ­example of the ­technology. It works, some of the time, and then when you want it to go back the right way up, it doesn’t ­always want to. You’ll just end up ­shaking the thing wildly in ­frustration with this ­feature turned on.

Nokia have always shone with their ­connectivity options and the N85 is no different. Browsing the web is made very easy as the N85’s ­operating system supports all the major mark-up ­languages.

Overall the N85 is a very good phone, armed to the teeth with ­features; we’re just not sure if it’s going to stand out as a world beater in the ­current market.

PROS
Browser supports all the major mark-up languages and it has the biggest OLED display to be integrated in a mobile phone yet.
CONS
The accelerometer works in fits and starts and you can only view documents.
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