It’s glossy, full of memory and is part of Nokia’s push to retake the cellphone market, but could the N81 fall before it’s hardly onto the track? Om Malik certainly seems to think so, using up some serious bile on the slick handset with, among many other things, keypad layout, the general speed of the phone and the number of times it crashed on him all coming in for major critique.

“The device behaved like a 3-year-old throwing a tantrum. 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.  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” Om Malik

It’s starting to heat up in the comments, though, with some voices chanting their agreement with Om and saving particular venom for a scroll-wheel that the OS can’t keep up with, while others suggest sticking with it and are surprised that his N81 showed issues theirs never have.

Looks like we’ll have to wait for further reviews before anything is conclusive on this one.