Seven cool little things about the Nokia N80

I was hoping to have found a few more things digging around this phone by now but hey it’s not as if I’m under a deadline or anything and I’ve written enough about what I don’t like so here a few things I found that I really like about my N80

• Holding the menu down to see whats running

This really is the life saver most people do not know about, been thrown back to the main menu in the middle of an application? hold down the menu button, it will list every application the phone is running, kind of like the task manager in windows. More importantly you can select to close down an application if it has crashed. Very handy.

• Holding the quick menu button opens the gallery

When you press the quick menu button, the one with the 4 arrows pointing away, this called the multimedia key which took me a while to figure out when customising the quick menu itself. By default it will send you to the media options of your phone, I wish it would send you straight to your pictures but hey close enough, and cool to know when you want to show someone a photo.

• Faster MiniSD card, faster N80.

This was the case with the old firmware anyway, V3.014, possibly not so much now with V4 as it is pretty nippy by comparison. While using V3.014 and the default SD card seemed to hold operations back slightly. Was worth going for a faster, larger card, seemed to help.

• Spot On app makes it a torch

This little app keeps the camera `Flash` on which can be kinda handy when stumbling around somewhere, worth getting.

• SymTorrent app, Bittorrent on your N80

This god-send of an app lets you run bittorrent off your phone, it is still in development (as is all open source stuff) and does not seem to be to willing to upload back, despite now supporting incoming connections, to other users at the moment but it does download perfectly. It seems to currently not like reseeding a torrent after you’ve finished it aswell. But anywho shove a large flash card into the phone and you got your self pretty much the lowest power bittorrent client known to man

• SmartMovie video player

Yet to really use this but I have tried and it is quite good, I havn’t had time to find the right settings to convert my videos to play on the phone (and the bundled converter in demo mode black and whites the videos every 30 seconds which defeats the whole point of a demo I feel) but when I have solved this, no lunchtime will ever be without Dragonball and Family Guy ever again, woo

•   Holding down the right menu button turns on Speech Recognition

This is quite possibly the best speech recognition I have used to date, my last encounters with SR was a few years ago back in the days of good old train your voice and it barely works method.  Now it seems you do not need to train it to your voice, it just kinda works. Just hold down the top right menu button and say the name of who you want to ring or SILENT to put it into silent or BLUETOOTH to turn on or off the bluetooth. I would say when it’s noisey, like on a street, it will not work but when it is quiet and everyone in the area has maximum chance of knowing what your are doing it works like a charm. Of course you will look like a tit when it goes wrong but it is all worth it when you can bathe in the glory of having activated your bluetooth on a whim and just as easily turn it off with the power of your own sultry tones. Marvelous.