With an 8-megapixel camera and a stylish new design update, this may be our favorite Nseries phone, but can it compete with the best smartphones? Find out in our Nokia N86 review.
Review summary of the Nokia N86:
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 The Nokia N86 offers some subtle but meaningful improvements over the Nokia N85, and it's quickly become our favorite of Nokia's Nseries devices and the one we'd recommend first, even over the mighty Nokia N97. The Nokia N86 packs all our favorite features, including one of the best cell phone cameras on the market, even better than the Sony Ericsson C905 on AT&T that we recently crowned our favorite. The N86 8MP also has solid music and multimedia playback features and even app downloads in Nokia's upstart Ovi Store. Still, for all its impressive stats, and they are impressive, in the end the improvements over the Nokia N85 weren't features we were clamoring for, and the most egregious problems with Nokia's Symbian interface and half-hearted U.S. market support haven't improved, while the competition is lapping Nokia in terms of interface design and social networking integration. We're still impressed with the dazzling OLED screen, though it isn't quite as unique as it once was, and we like the design improvements that make this a more sleek, yet usable phone. Plus, it has the smartest kickstand we've ever seen. But the aging menus and the lagging OS performance means we're less impressed with the same old stuff we've already seen. Release: September 2009. Price: $500.
Pros: Great OLED display. Takes great pictures. Packed with features, including surprises like FM transmitter and intelligent kickstand. Design, especially keypad, improved over Nokia N85.
Cons: Symbian OS isn't getting any younger. Camera interface was unimpressive. Lacks some features out of the box that U.S. buyers expect, like IM support.
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Full Nokia N86 Review:
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Design – Very Good
The Nokia N86 8MP is the pinnacle of Nokia's work on the Nseries over the past 3-4 years, even as newer devices move the family in strange directions. The phone is a dual-slider, so if you move the screen up you'll get a numeric keypad, and if you move it down you'll get media controls lined up in a column. The phone is a classy black slab, with soft touch paint around back and a mostly nondescript face, broken a Stonehenge arrangement of nearly unlabeled buttons. Compared to the Nokia N85 that preceded it, the Nokia N86 is more trim and polished, but almost exactly the same phone. The buttons and the keypad have seen some comfortable improvements, and the phone now features an intelligent kickstand around back. Pull out the stand and the N86 will perform one of a number of actions. We set the stand to open Facebook when it was kicked out.
The Nokia N86 keeps the best and the worst of the Nokia N85 design. The newer phone gets the same great OLED display. OLED screens have always looked more colorful and vibrant in our tests, and they also use less power to save battery life. Unfortunately, Nokia hardly puts the display to good use, as the Symbian S60 interface is easily the worst interface design shipping on a flagship phone like the Nokia N86 8MP. It's old and poorly organized, with aging icon graphics and little customization available to new users. Text looks jagged and dated, and there's hardly a feature on the phone that isn't dragged down by a frumpy interface design, from the camera to the Web browser to the GPS navigation app. The features on the phone all worked very well, for the most part, but the interface was a real drag.
Calling – Very Good
The Nokia N86 8MP can use AT&T and T-Mobile for voice and date, though you'll need to use AT&T if you want real, 3G speeds. On AT&T's network in the Dallas metro area, the Nokia N86 didn't sound so great during calls. Calls had a somewhat distant and hollow sound to them, with a digitized static bubbling up from beneath. On our end, our callers sounded much better than we sounded to them, and our conversations were clean and easy from the handset. The Nokia N86 claimed a full complement of signal bars. For battery life, we saw the same results we got with the last generation, a little more than 5 hours in a single call, while Nokia only promises around 4 hours.
While some smartphone manufacturers like HTC and Samsung are offering detailed, intuitive calling screens that provide easy access to caller information and message history, Nokia has left calling features mostly alone for their higher-end devices. You can manage multiple calls, making conference calls and swapping between callers, but it requires some menu digging, and it never looked pretty. The phone also uses Nokia's own speaker-independent software for voice commands, but in our tests the Nokia N86 only guessed our choices correctly about 6 times out of 10.
It's time for the Nseries, phones that ship in the U.S. for hundreds of dollars without carrier subsidies, to start acting like high-end smartphones. We'd like to see features like visual voicemail, as you'll find on many other phones beyond AT&T's iPhone, and a better looking address book. The Nokia N86 had no trouble checking mail from our Microsoft Exchange account, but our address book did not sync properly. Most PC users will prefer the Nokia PC Suite, in any case, since that desktop software can synchronize with your personal address book as well.
Messaging - Good
The Nokia N86 comes with some nice apps to handle e-mail, but lacks impressive software for simpler text messaging. The phone doesn't come with any instant messaging software onboard, nor any built-in software to handle social networks or Twitter. For e-mail, the built in mail applications can find settings for most popular IMAP and POP e-mail services, and the Mail for Exchange can handle the corporate stuff, if your corporation uses Microsoft Exchange Servers. The e-mail apps weren't attractive, and text was blocky and looked dated, but most of the important functions were present and easy to find with some menu digging.
The keypad on the Nokia N86 8MP is very nice, and greatly improved from the flat, ridged keypad on the older Nokia N85. Still, there seems to be room around the edges for an even wider keyboard layout, and serious messaging fans will pine for a real keyboard before too long. The phone is better suited to checking in and reading e-mails, not so much for writing.
Through the built-in Ovi store, you can download some messaging clients to check in on MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, but there isn't a first party client available for any of the popular messaging services. A Facebook link on the device was only a bookmark in the Web browser, and the phone even lacks the rudimentary Facebook integration that we saw in the Nokia N97. Nokia would be more interesting to U.S. buyers if some of these features were more tightly integrated, as we're seeing on phones like the Palm Pre and Motorola Cliq.
Camera – Very Good
The 8-megapixel camera is the standout feature on the Nokia N86 8MP, and the key upgrade over the older Nokia N85. Even Nokia's flagship Nokia N97 uses a 5-megapixel sensor, making this phone Nokia's leading pugilist in the megapixel match-ups. Nokia's only real competitor in the U.S. market is the Sony Ericsson C905 on AT&T and the Samsung Memoir on T-Mobile. Of the three 8-megapixel cameras on the U.S. market, we think the Nokia N86 8MP took the best looking pictures, and they were the best looking images we've seen from a cameraphone to date.
Images weren't perfect. A great point-and-shoot camera will still produce better images. But the Nokia N86 makes a fine replacement if you want to lug around only one device. The best images we got from the N86 were certainly print-worthy, and the camera even did a nice job handling close-up shots and providing some interesting depth of field effects. The panorama was kind of a letdown, though the Nokia N86 takes the largest panorama shots we've seen from a cameraphone. We were quite impressed by the dual-LED flash, which managed to light up a nearby scene at night and also keep from washing out with the deathly blue haze that other cameras can't avoid.
We wish the camera mode on the Nokia N86 behaved more like a camera. We'd like options like multiple auto focus points, which would let us keep our subjects locked when the camera wants to focus on the larger backdrop. We'd like easier control over white balance, and some fine tuning for ISO sensitivity and maybe shutter speed. While we're adding camera functions, how about a real camera menu, too. As we've mentioned frequently, the Symbian S60 interface isn't pleasing anyone, and we think an interface designed around the shooting, like on Sony Ericsson's CyberShot phones, would be helpful. Check out our image samples below for the pics from our testing time with the Nokia N86 8MP.
Sunny shots
Elvis on the Boardwalk
The Giant
Empty Rides
Sunny Dunes
Close-ups and beach shots
Clam Shell with water
Shells and Sand in Close-Up Mode
Beach Warning Sign
Dunes
Glass Vase, out of focus
Sunrise at the Ocean City, Md, Boardwalk
Boardwalk and Lights
Shark, Believe It
Shark, Or Not
Horizon
Rides at Sunrise
With the Flash, Panorama
Self Portrait at Night with LED flash
Country Club Sign at Night, with LED flash
Panorama sample
Multimedia – Very Good
Thanks to some slick hardware features, the Nokia N86 is a great phone for multimedia playback, and it can handle a wide variety of media needs. For music fans, the phone has a very good music player that starts playing as soon as you slide open the multimedia control side of the phone and press play. The phone handled all of the songs we transferred to the impressive 8GB of internal memory and loaded all our songs into the library with no help from us. Songs sounded great on the phone, and music even sounded pretty good coming from the phone's own built-in speakers. Still, we preferred to plug in our own favorite earbuds, easy enough with the N86's standard 3.5mm headphone jack.
In addition to the basics, the Nokia N86 has some tricks up its sleeve. There's an FM transmitter built into the phone, so you can play music and audio for movies through a nearby stereo system or car radio. In our tests, the FM transmitter was very impressive, easily beating similar standalone units we keep on hand for our iPhone and iPod players. There's also an FM radio onboard. If the 8GB of internal memory isn't enough for you, the Nokia N86 also takes microSD cards up to 16GB, so you can top out at 24GB of total memory. The phone will work with the Nokia Music software on the PC side, or you can mount the phone as a Mass Storage device on a Macintosh. Either way, the N86 uses a standard microUSB cable, and the phone charges while it's plugged in.
For video playback, the Nokia N86 did a very nice job. The phone's screen is only QVGA resolution, displaying 240 by 320 pixels, but the N86 had no trouble displaying videos 4 times that size, up to VGA resolution. Anything larger or cropped to a strange ratio wouldn't play, but properly formatted videos looked crisp and bright on the Nokia N86's OLED display. Throughout the multimedia experience, we could complain about the simple, basic interface design problems, but we can't complain about the phone's powerful multimedia capabilities.
Web browsing and GPS - Good
For Web browsing and GPS navigation, the Nokia N86 relies on a couple old Nokia standbys. The Nokia Mini Map browser was among the first Webkit browsers, and it can just barely hold its own against competitors on the Apple iPhone and Google Android systems. Pages looked okay, but lousy text rendering kept the Nokia browser from perfectly mimicking the desktop experience. Scrolling was also a problem, and we wish the Nokia N86 included the scrolling Navi Wheel center button that we liked on other Nokia Nseries devices, like the Nokia N79.
On a similar note, the Nokia Maps program does a fine job with turn-by-turn directions, but it, too, is starting to feel long in the tooth. The mapping app did a fine job finding us quickly, even when we didn't have the best view of the sky above, and following us on our trek. But a better interface design would have made using the powerful mapping application more appealing.
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