Why the N86 is the best phone Nokia currently makes

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the N86, Nokia’s newly released flagship camera-phone with a hugely impressive 8 megapixel, Carl Zeiss lens. It’s also, in our humble opinion, the best phone Nokia currently makes. Now, with behemoths of the phone world like the N97, E71 and E75 currently roaming around the Nokia product portfolio, that’s a pretty controversial statement. How can the cheeky little N86 beat the big beasts to the title? Here’s our reasoning.

By rights, this post should be about the N86′s stablemate the N97. Gagdet fans the world over – including The Guide – salivated with anticipation when the N97 was announced. This, finally, seemed to be the device to give the iPhone a run for its money: top quality camera, physical keyboard, true 16:9 widescreen, rock solid Symbian OS, huge internal storage. It seemed the boys and girls at Espoo had finally hit back successfully at Cupertino.

How disappointing then to learn the truth. The N97 is crippled by dodgy software (the OS is currently very buggy but bugs can be fixed, what’s more worrying is that it’s unwieldy to use and it looks, as well as feels, very old-fashioned) and a shortage of processing power and memory. Add to that the strange hardware decisions that Nokia made (odd keyboard, fixed angled screen, insistence on using yesterday’s resistive screen technology instead of today’s capacitive) and the lack of quality control (there have been plenty of reports of the camera lens covers actually scratching the lens they are supposed to protect as well as system wide crashes) and you have what amounts to a huge let-down.

So, surely we can turn to the Eseries to find Nokia’s best phone? Eseries phones, after all, are traditionally higher spec or at least made from more premium materials.

Well, the E71 and E75 are great phones. We’ve reviewed and liked them both in the past. The E71, with hindsight, stands out as a real classic: a strong, powerful workhorse that also has the looks to cut it in high-society. At the time of release, we chose it over the iPhone 3G and we stand by that choice.

But here’s the rub: the game has changed and neither of these phones feels truly special enough any more. In these days of the HTC Hero, iPhone 3GS, and the Palm Pre, the problem is that Symbian / S60 just feels a little too long in the tooth for an all-singing all dancing smartphone. How can we sum-up the Eseries? It’s great (class-leading, in fact) hardware let down by creaky old software. It’s time to move on.

Now, the observant amongst you will notice that we’ve just dug ourselves into a little hole. If we want to argue that the N86 is the best phone Nokia makes, choosing to rubbish the S60 operating system which it also runs may seem like an odd way of getting there.

Well, our take on it is this: with the N86, the software is far less important. What mattered so much in ‘do it all’ phones likes the Eseries matters far less in a more focused device. Simply put, the ‘purpose’ of the device is what matters. You see, the N86 doesn’t really try to be a jack of all trades like the devices mentioned above. It’s focused, it’s lean, it knows exactly what it wants.

The N86 is unashamedly about giving you a simply fantastic little camera with a phone built -in. It has two stand-out features in this regard. The first, of course, if the Tessar Carl Zeiss lens and accompanying software. They deliver simply amazing photos and video footage. Check out All About Symbian’s excellent review for a full run-down.

The second is the AMOLED screen. Don’t worry about understanding the technology just know that it is brighter and crisper than any screen you’ve seen before. Mate it to the very clever little active kick-stand at the back of the device and you’ve got a beautiful make-shift video / photo player anywhere you go.

These two stand-out features come wrapped in a body that is superbly built and represents probably the most refined version of what has become, over the years, a truly classic Nokia form factor: the compact dual-slider. In a world of ubiquitous touchscreen devices, we think the little N86 looks very cool indeed.

And that’s why it’s Nokia’s best device right now: at a time when most devices are trying so desperately to be all things to all people. the N86 holds its focus and genuinely excels in one or two key areas. We’re not saying it’s for everyone but anyone who values image or video capture in their device shouldn’t look anywhere else.