A phone hasn't been just a phone for a long time, it's now a camera phone, music phone or whatever other application the manufacturer has chosen to make its secondary (although sometimes it feels like primary) function over simply making and receiving calls. Nokia have excellent examples of music and camera phones in their range and have always seemed keen to add a gaming phone to their line-up, but have as yet been unable to satisfy this difficult market. However, is the N81 going to change that?

Nokia also like to give the customer the chance to pick their preferred phone form factor, offering candybars, sliders and flips throughout their range, and the N81 is a slider phone, just not a very compact one. Measuring 102x50x18 and weighing in at 140grams, this is a big phone, but thanks to the glossy black finish and careful panel design, it looks very sleek and stylish. The slider has a great positive action and the revealed keypad is flat and attractively designed, however until you are used to the layout, the lack of key division will keep your attention focused.

As well as being a 3G phone, the N81 is also a smartphone using Nokia's S60 Symbian software. Often maligned for its sloth-like responses, the N81's 96MB of SDRAM seem to speed it up nicely for normal usage, only getting bogged down when doing heavy multi-tasking. The menus are easy to follow, but unfortunately the icons are not animated, and lots of different options are available quickly and easily using the revolving menu system, which also works well when viewing the photo gallery.

The camera is the least impressive part of the tech inside the N81 as it's only a 2MP item, albeit with autofocus, however if it's a camera phone you're after, then as mentioned earlier, Nokia cater for this rather well with the N73 or N95. No, this is all about the N-Gage gaming and music functions. Playing the pre-installed demo games can be done either in portrait or landscape view, a rare feature in on a smartphone, and is something of a breakthrough – the football game comes alive in landscape for example – and full games can be purchased and downloaded from Nokia's dedicated gaming site.

The music player is also excellent, with simple functionality and great sound quality, and a 3.5mm connection means you can use your own headphones too. Side mounted stereo speakers pump your music out at levels guaranteed to irritate the rest of the train/bus/shopping centre's patrons. The N81's features don't stop their either, it's Wi-Fi enabled, has a front mounted video-call camera, FM radio and a wide variety of office related functions too.

Available in either grey or blue colours and as an 8GB version or 12MB version with a MicroSD slot and supplied 2GB card, the N81 is a very versatile model, let down only by its overall size and weight and the ordinary camera.