I owned a Mainland Chinese Nokia N82 for two days, which I purchased for 4180 yuan ($575.84) from a Zhongyu Telecom embedded inside the Kunming Jin Ma Fang (金马坊) Park & Shop.

Warning about the Chinese N82

The version of the N82 sold in Mainland China does not have a Wi-Fi antenna. It seems this is due to some Chinese regulation, probably to let the government mobile phone companies earn more wireless internet profits. Nokia Care in Kunming informed me that installing a different country's version of the operating system would not help, suggesting that the Chinese N82 is a different piece of hardware. It also seems that the Chinese version (labeled RM-314 on the sticker behind the battery) does not have 3G.

A Slow Return

I wanted to return the phone because it did not have Wi-Fi. I managed to return it due to the pre-installed Adobe PDF reader crashing at startup (it worked initially). I'm not sure if it was a hardware or software problem, but the Nokia Care in Kunming was very helpful. The mobile phone store, on the other hand, actively tried to be unhelpful.

The return process was an interesting adventure, and I did get to play with the phone for a few days.

GPS Performance

I have used the Garmin (yellow) eTrex and the Garmin GPS60 (which I own) extensively. I read reviews that the GPS on the N82 was slow, but it seemed fine to me — comparable to both dedicated Garmin units in my subjective tests, taking what seemed like 20 or 30 seconds to acquire satellites on the corner of a larger intersection in Kunming where enough sky is visible for GPS to even work.

The stock GPS user interface on the N82 is pretty clunky, but I imagine that there's some third party software with a better GPS UI. The UI only displayed five satellites, which I took to mean that the unit can use at most five satellites at a time (compared to GPS60's twelve).

The estimated precision on the N82 hovered around 20-30 meters — less than the 10-20 meters that I usually get with the GPS60. Coordinates were displayed to 1/1000 of a degree as opposed to 1/10000 of a degree on the Garmin.

I would definitely use the N82 GPS over the Garmin most of the time, given that the Garmin is a big fat beast, assuming that using the GPS on the N82 wasn't an instant battery killer. The Garmin has the advantage that it lasts about 2 days continuously on.

Build Quality

The iPhone is thin. So thin that I'm sure I'd break it. The N82 looks and feels solid enough to sit on. Not that I suggest sitting on it.

I had read that the numeric keypad buttons are sharp, and some people have complained about their fingers hurting. I can vaguely imagine my fingers hurting after madly writing a novel on the phone, but the buttons were fine by me. The joypad (D pad?) action, on the other hand, was very spongy. It also seemed to be required to use the joypad to do most of the navigating around inside the phone, so I wouldn't be surprised if the joystick is the first thing that wears out for most people.

Symbian UI

The UI is confusing. Not everything is intuitive. There are selection lists all over the place that you have to slowly navigate using the joypad. As awful as the T68i UI is, it at least lets you pick from a list of choices using the keypad.

Camera

The camera is slow. You aren't going to be taking snapshots. Other than that, it seemed fine. I have no doubt there will be beautiful N82 photo galleries appearing all over the internet, but using the camera reminded me why I bought a DSLR.

Radio

I listened to Kunming radio for a while. That was novel and exciting. But it brings to mind an example of the UI being weird: if you want to listen to the radio through the phone speakers, you have to first plug in headphones before you get the menu option for playing through the speakers.

I'd buy that for a...

All in all, I liked it. If a version with Wi-Fi, and simplified characters pinyin input were available in front of me at the same price today, I would definitely buy it.