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The verdicts pour in on Nokia's el-cheapo iPhone eater, the N81...

It's the week after Nokia announced its "Comes With Music" strategy for mobile phones, and the verdicts are starting to come in on the N81, its newest music phone. Let's hope the music strategy doesn't depend on this phone, because not all the comments are enthusiastic.

As a music player, the N81 gets pretty uncritical approval from several quarters. But as a phone, it gets much the same response that most Europeans have offered the iPhone from Apple: "not up to scratch, really."

Comes With Music is just one of the aspects of Nokia's future strategy outlined this weekend at Nokia World in Amsterdam. The N81, however, was the third in a range of music phones announced recently, starting with the N91; then the N95,and now this. All have adequate (eight gigabytes) chip storage for music. At the Register, the immediate comparison was with the superior N95:

If you’re looking for plenty of track storage in a smartphone, the N81 is a lower-cost alternative to the N95 and, indeed, Apple’s iPhone. It doesn’t come with the same wealth of functionality as the N95 – no GPS and a lower quality camera than the N95’s five-megapixel job. The design's slick but the plastic casing gives the N81 a cheap feel. And while the controls are cluttered and definitely not as ergonomic as they could be the music player performance is excellent.

But that's about it for the warmth and approval:

While not at the top end of the Nseries range, the N81 (8GB), just as the N91 before it, is aimed not at the power users, but just below them, with boxier styling, the meagre 2 megapixel camera and the absence of a GPS chipset.

And the reviewer doesn't think this is the target market - people who don't want a really good quality phone. They won't be impressed:

The N81 is designed for those looking for both a good smartphone and top of the line music device, while remaining stylish and appealing. While I could argue that this is a fully converged device, the regular user (and the marketing) is going to focus heavily on the music playing abilities of the device.

At specialist Symbian web site AllAboutSymbian, enthusiasm was muted:

The N81 is a cracking music device, not a super-converged swiss army knife like the N95. Instead it is more a hunting knife, designed for a single purpose - to keep you entertained while on the move. And it does this well, and if that's what you are looking for, then I have no hesitation in recommending it.

But after that, the gripes start appearing. In particular, Ewan Spence was entirely unimpressed by the display - see photo - which was virtually useless in daylight.

Those disapproving reviews shine like Oscars compared with the greeting the phone got from Om Malik.

The device  behaved like a three-year-old throwing a tantrum.

And his comments went steadily downhill from there:

Unless this is an especially buggy device, N81 has to be one of the worst Nokia phones I have ever used and would be loathe to recommend it to anyone.

Malik concludes:

It is underpowered and the Symbian S60 OS behaves like Windows ME. Remember that piece of junk? Well this is worse. It takes more than 10 seconds to open a text message. Switching between applications is akin to me running — out of breath. One has to constantly reboot the phone to even make phone calls.

He's sending it back to Nokia.

Several reviewers found the compromise between "great phone" and "great music player" failed. Complaints focused especially on the keyboard, which required precise fingers (and small ones!) to avoid mistyping.

Strangely, few people have been quite as explicit in their comments about the iPhone; but from interviews conducted by NewsWireless with ordinary users, only a purist Mac enthusiast would strenuously deny that it has many of the same faults.

Where it scores, obviously, is in having access to iTunes, and in having the cool new iPhone user interface with those intuitive 'gestures' to control it. But even with the grumpy Om panning the N81 to the ground, consensus seems to be that the Nokia music line matches the Apple phone in "value for money" stakes; and the N95 looks like the one to go for - at least until Sony Ericsson's delayed super-Walkman phone, launched June, appears in shops in February.