I’m not going to cover all the basics, you can find out all the specs from another site. Summary: it communicates by just about every means possible: quad-band GSM, 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, FM. It’s missing a GPS receiver, which is too bad, because Nokia just released some really cool navi software. More about that later. The screen just rocks–it’s hi-res and readable in any light.

It has two web browsers, which for some reason have indistinguishable icons. I won’t spend much time on them because neither are particularly useful. The “Services” browser is a WAP/HTML browser made to render web pages at screen-size. It doesn’t work on a lot of pages, but it’s stable. The “Web” browser is made to render pages faithfully, and it’s based on the Safari rendering engine, so it does a really good job until it runs out of memory, which is often. When they get the bugs out, “Web” will probably be the way to go.

Currently, the two real choices for web browsing are good old Opera Mini, which uses a downsizing proxy to speed up page loads over GPRS, or to use the S60 v3 version of Opera, which renders pages as well as “Web” but does it way faster and doesn’t crash, and although it’s missing some of the eyecandy, is nearly as functional as what you have on your desktop right now, especially over a Wi-Fi connection.

Speaking of Wi-Fi, if you’ve been using GPRS for a long time you’ve probably never browsed very fast on your phone. With Opera and Wi-Fi, I can page through Google Reader faster than I can skim a page full of headlines. I’ll take some video of it and post later.

What do you do with all that broadband? Put a ton of internet apps on. At this time I have the four web browsers, three mapping programs, VOIP service, and a two podcast clients. The default podcast client is missing some features here and there (for example, bookmarking current place in a podcast), but it does download original MP3s and videos from any site you want, limited by what the N80 can play, of course. The podcast client I used before, Mobilcast, is more mature, but it only streams selections from Melodeo’s library of downsampled streams.

There’s a built-in RSS reader, and Opera and Opera Mini have them as well, but I’ve not really used any of them because it’s so darn convenient to get to Google Reader.

The N80ie (Internet Edition) comes with some software to upload pictures and videos to sharing sites, but it’s not as convenient and featureful as ShoZu, which uploads to several services and also pulls comments back down to your phone. It also works as another podcast/vodcast client, although like Mobilcast, it works from a limited library of downsampled content.

The phone is capable of making video calls. I haven’t done that. However, I have tried out the VOIP, and it’s surprisingly easy to set up. An included (or at least easy to download) setup wizard for Gizmo had me talking via my existing GizmoProject account in about three minutes. The only time I’d end up using this feature would be for cheap international calls; would have been useful for about six weeks of last year, but this year, who knows.

Other reviews complain about the short battery life. After the first four days of using the phone I’d agree, because my desk at work is a cell phone dead zone, where there’s no reception and the phone burns itself out trying to make contact. However, I used it at home (good reception) and even though I did 1-2 hours of browsing and navi (and some talking), it still had full bars at the end of the day.

Speaking of navi, back to the new software. Nokia’s Smart2Go is a truly cool navi package meant to compete with dedicated systems. It will use an integrated GPS receiver or an external bluetooth receiver. Even without GPS it’s every bit as useful as Google Maps for Mobile, plus the interface is quicker and it has downloadable maps. The talking turn-by-turn directions cost money in the form of a subscription with terms from one week ($10) to three years ($130). I won’t be going out and buying a GPS puck any time soon, but if I was traveling somewhere unfamiliar (like I did last year) I’d totally consider it worth the dough.

In summary, here are the good and bad points of the phone. First, the good:

• Many web browsing options, and at least two of them work.
• Great screen
• Small overall size
• Takes good pictures in decent light
• That great S60 user interface
• The WiFi is fast (> 3 mbits d/l on dslreports’ speed test over my WPA network) and super handy for downloading podcasts, uploading photos and video to the home network, browsing.

And now the bad:200 kbytes/sec

• Battery life. It’s just too cool to be running out of battery after three solid hours of fiddling.
• Not enough memory considering the size of the apps. My old 6620 used to bog down only when I had 7-8 apps open, and I always left the commonly used ones open just for speed. Some N80 apps eat up all the resources and thus need to close all the other apps when they open. Thankfully, apps launch faster than on my old phone.
• Video resolution is 352×288
• Doesn’t play iPod videos natively

Next gadget review will be the iRobot Scooba I got for $160 refurbished. Totally worth it.