Nokia N81 8GB

We like the N81 for two reasons. First, it's a beast. If the iPhone is a sports car, this is a truck: far from ungainly, but clearly more concerned with function than form. And second, it's the first handset to run Nokia's much anticipated and oddly elusive new N-Gage platform.

A close relative of the N95, the N81 literally bulges with features, including 802.11 b and g wireless connectivity, USB 2.0, and a whopping 8GB of onboard flash storage. We could start a list, but there's little point. It's simpler just to say the N81 has everything. In terms of technology, only the measly two-megapixel camera is a disappointment.

The handset is both boxy and glossy, with a slider design and an unobtrusive, slightly spongy set of multimedia playback keys beneath the large 2.4-inch screen. The display is crisp and bright, and well ahead of the spec curve at 16.7 million colours (24-bit) and 240x320 pixels. In design, it's classic understated Nokia, with brightly backlit keys and solid look and feel. For some, in fact, we suspect it'll be a little too solid.

At 102 x 50 x 18mm it has more or less the same dimensions as a K800i, but it weighs a hefty 140g, which, though it might not sound like much, feels substantially heavier than the K800i's 115g on the palm of your hand. It feels, that is, like a brick.

The software interface is typically functional, but Nokia has made an effort to jazz it up in two ways – one of which works and one of which doesn't. To dispense with the failure first, the directional pad doubles up as a touch-wheel that's so sketchy and unresponsive Nokia has sheepishly opted to disable it as default.

The touch-wheel was probably intended to accompany the second and more successful bit of glamour: the optional revolving menus. In these, you navigate by pressing left and right to spin a carousel of choices, and although a properly functioning touch-wheel would have made navigating these more satisfying, they're still nice. The web browser works in a similar way, sliding along and zooming in as you navigate, and the effect is neat, albeit shamelessly derivative of Apple's software.

As you'd expect of a device with 8GB of storage space, music playback is excellent. Controls for the media player are present on the front of the phone, and it's possible to start playing music without even entering the menu. Of course, this carries the risk of accidentally firing up Iggy Pop while you're sending a text on the bus, so caution is advised.

Transferring tracks to the phone is as easy as plugging in a USB cable and the phone takes a standard 3.5 mm headphone jack, so you're free to plug in any old headphones or speakers. Music playback is crisp and bassy, and this extends to voice calls. On both standard and speakerphone, the sound quality is excellent.

The N81 is set up to browse Nokia's forthcoming Ovi portal, an online store positioned as a rival to iTunes, from which you can download not only music tracks but Nokia maps and, of course, games.

There's no question that Nokia is trying to achieve a lot with this phone, but one of the most significant achievements it stands to make is to establish the once-stalled N-Gage platform, which could do for mobile gaming what the renaissance did for western civilisation.

There are three N-Gage demos preloaded on the N81: Space Impact Kappa Base, FIFA 08, and Asphalt 3: Street Rules. Visually, the standard is above that of the more common J2ME platform and closer to the level of Symbian OS, which this phone also supports.

On the N81, you can play in portrait or landscape view, with the most considerate of the three games – FIFA – allowing you to use landscape both ways up, with the directional pad either to the left or the right of the screen.

This isn't the first phone to allow landscape gaming, clearly, but it's a clever and subtly implemented feature. A single panel at the top of the screen becomes what would be the A and B buttons on a conventional control pad and the directional pad functions as normal. And while it's not quite as intuitive as the traditionally shaped input, it's both responsive and sufficiently robust to take a good mashing, which is what really counts.

Unlike N-Gage QD, the sad monster that most graphically embodies the failure of N-Gage's first iteration, the N81 is a perfect transformer: it looks like a phone when it's being a phone, and it functions well as a console when it's being a console. In gaming terms, the only disappointment is the directional pad, not because it doesn't work well but because if it had been slightly more game-friendly this phone would have earned Pocket Gamer's maximum review score.

Nevertheless, equipped as it is with the ability to run both Symbian and N-Gage games, as well as the humble Java games that most of us are confined to, the N81 is comfortably ahead of the crowd in terms of mobile gaming alone. The fact that it's also one of the most powerful and feature-packed handsets available is simply the icing on the cake.