The Nokia n81 has dimensions of 102mm length and 50mm width. It has a thickness of 17.9 mm and weighs about 140g. It has up to 8 GB internal memory for various applications like music, games, video and images among others. The device has a talk time of up to 240 minutes GSM and 180 minutes WCDMA and a standby time of up to 17 days. It has a video recording time of up to 3.5 hours and video playback time of up to 4.5 hours both with QVGA. It also has a Browsing time up to 5 hours, music playback time of up to 11.5 hours and Gaming time of up to 6 hours.

The Nokia N81 8GB phone has S60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 1 user interface and S60 software on Symbian OS operating system. It has dedicated media keys which enables easy access and usage of various applications like music and video. The phone has an active matrix 2.4” QVGA main color display with up to 16.7 million colors.

Other features include speed dialing, automatic redial, logs and Conference call. The Voice features of the phone include Speaker independent name dialing, talking ring tones, internet calls apart from the voice commands, voice recorder and integrated handsfree speaker. The Multimedia messaging facility can be used to share your views in graphic detail using a multi-slide presentation. It also has the capacity to automatically resize your megapixel images to fit MMS, of course depending on the network support in use..

The Nokia N81 8GB has WLAN connectivity with UPnP support, Bluetooth technology and a 3.5mm Nokia AV Connector. It has a 2megapixel camera with digital zoom up to 20x and MPEG-4 VGA video capture of up to 15fps. The device has integrated flash modes including automatic and for red-eye reduction. The Music features include 8GB internal flash memory, playlist management, dedicated volume keys with 20 volume steps, 5-band equalizer and Nokia Stereo Music Headset.

The phone also has the facility to subscribe to and download podcasts over the air direct to the phone. It also has stereo FM radio and Visual Radio support.