A glossy black finish, a stunner of a screen and buttons that enhance the design contours. The Nokia N81 8GB is the multimedia messiah that threatens to turn every known mobile experience on its head. Built with the sole purpose of providing music, videos and true gaming, the light and easy-to-use slide phone (is it even a phone any longer?) is the perfect way to enter a world you’ve only dreamt of.

The 16 million colours displayed on a 2.4-inch screen give the interface a smooth and translucent sheen. The multimedia menu key, right next to the hot keys that fire up the media options, finally does away with the annoying list or grid view. Instead, there are 3-D menus that you can literally browse through. If you don’t want to listen to music, just flick the direction key and a smooth menu of games roles out. Don’t want that either? Another flick will bring you to contacts, Internet access, maps or the camera. It’ not just the rolling screens that grab attention, but also the sheer speed with which you can zoom through to what you want.

With 8 GB of space to fill out and access points that range from Bluetooth 2.0 to the trusted USB, you have enough space and plenty of ways to store what you want, when you want. Nokia has gone the extra mile just to prove this: the phone comes preloaded with 10 English songs, 10 English music videos, 10 Hindi songs, 10 comedy scenes from Hindi movies, and the full three hours of Sholay. The phone has built-in speakers that can handle most scales and comes bundled with ear phones. In a smart move, instead of making propriety connections, the N81 8GB comes with the standard 3.5-mm jack. So you can connect it to all the speakers you already own and the next time you go to a party, you can take your music and set the floor on fire.

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