Nokia N80ie: fantastic external speaker for music

Since all the buzz is about that "other" music phone this week, I figured I’d check out the music features of the Nokia N80ie that I’m using for a few weeks. Most of my music listening is done online: streamed either from the Zune Marketplace, Pandora or XM Radio. I don’t think I’d really stream any music over EDGE with the N80ie so I didn’t try that for now; maybe I’ll give that a shot in the future.

For this quick hit video, I just used the Nokia PC Suite to transfer a ripped CD from my UMPC to the N80. Nokia PC Suite it similar to ActiveSync or WMDC and works very well from what I’ve seen so far. I let the music transfer program optimize the audio files to save space and the tune you’ll hear me play on the Nokia is a 47 kbps bitrate that takes up a scant 795 KB in .m4a format. I contrast that to the 128 kbps WMA file that was created on the T-Mobile Dash: the same song took up 2.03 MB. I’m not sure the video really shows off the high sound quality of the Nokia N80 external speaker, but I’m very impressed.

If this short, quick-hit video format is beneficial, let us know in the comments. We use our Mobile Media Edition for in-depth reviews, but kicking out these brief videos with an iSight camera and integrated mic doesn’t take much time or editing. If they provide value, we’ll see about doing more.

Note: for some reason the first few seconds of the video are flaky and pixelated. My source looks good, so I’ll chalk it up to a YouTube processing issue.