Nokia N8 Quick Review

Today isn’t some fine day in pre-recession 2006 where everything’s a-ok with Lehman Brothers and Bush is still the President and Nokia still rules the global cellphone arena. Fast forward to 2010 where Nokia have been caught napping in the wake of the iPhone era. After a really long time, Nokia have a phone with which they can throw the gauntlet into the ring. Or can they?

Nokia is pegging the N8 as the best thing that ever happened to the telecom industry but that isn’t the whole story. What Nokia probably wanted to say is “We are playing catchup to the iPhone and Android devices. Our Ivy league Marketing Manager sent us this tag-line in the mail after we gave him a performance bonus last night.”

Jose-Luis Martinez, VP Mobile Computing at Nokia, looking smug with an N8. The pain is visible. (The comments are of the writer and are not necessarily those of the website, SatishSays.com :-p)

DESIGN & BUILD QUALITY:

The N8 has sleek aluminum sides and the brushed metal look is pretty cool to look at and hold. It comes in 5 different colours but I’m reckoning the black and silver will sell the most. There is a HDMI port on the top which is tucked away under a neat plastic lid. To the back are the camera, Xenon flash and the loudspeaker. The N8 feels sturdy and definitely looks like it could take a couple of knocks.
My only gripe with the design is a lack of hardware “back” key.

SCREEN

The N8 sports a 3.5” AMOLED capacitive touchscreen which allows it to support multi-touch(Welcome to 2007, Nokia). Its rated at 640 x 360 and is pretty decent for consuming visual media. The display does its job pretty well and has good legibility even in direct sunlight. Screen response is nice and snappy too.

SYMBIAN^3 UI:

The Symbian^3  OS is Nokia’s (feeble) reply to the Android and the iOS4. The UI looks fresh enough to be regarded as a contender in the smart phone battle.  The home screen has 3 panes which can be loaded with widgets of your liking. The main menu UI is unchanged from the previous versions of the symbian OS. The task manager now shows thumbnails of the running apps which is a nice touch.

The virtual QWERTY keypad is quite simply, a nightmare. It takes you to a new screen every time you type and is hopelessly irritating. The contacts have a Facebook and Twitter integration and there is a provision for threaded messaging. Overall, the UI is good but just not up to the Froyo or iOS4 mark when it comes to usability.

Nokia has revamped the file manager and it can handle all your copy, paste, move and sort needs. The music player is almost the same but it now has a cover-flow like interface. All the major formats are supported by the player.The video player has DivX out of the box and the demo 720p file played without any hiccups.

CAMERA:
To say that N8 has an amazing camera is an understatement. Its a full fledged digicam without optical zoom. The N8 has the highest sensor size found in any mobile camera. At 1/1.83″ inches it kills the competition(read Samsung Pixon12) with the subtlety of a Bazooka. The shots taken were terrific with pretty good color balance. Even the video recorder took stellar videos at 720p. It also took exceptional shots even in low light. The only let down here was the interface which still needs a few improvements to speed up the process.

CONNECTIVITY:

Nokia phones are usually loaded when it comes to connectivity options and the N8 doesn’t disappoint. The phone has all the 4 letter mumbo jumbo you can think of and then some. GPRS, EDGE and 3G with HSPA (10.2 Mbps HSDPA and 2.0 Mbps HSDPA) and Bluetooth 3.0 with A2DP support, Wi-Fi 802.11N support. The killer feature, however is the TV-out (720p video) via HDMI with Dolby Digital Plus sound. We reckon, it might just replace your DVD player.

PERFORMANCE

The phone is powered with a 680 Mhz processor with 256 MB of RAM on board. Not exactly flattering numbers, but it gets the job done. I tried loading a lot of apps in the background but the phone didn’t show any visible dip in performance.

The phone is powered by a 1200 mAh LI-Ion BL-4D battery that’s quoted at up to 400 hours of stand-by or up to 12 and a half hours of talk time.

VERDICT:

We all know that Symbian sucks on touchscreen and Ovi store is the fastest way to lose your money this side of any Madoff led Ponzi scam.
The N8 retails at Rs.25500 which is a tad steep considering its abilities. For a bit more, you can get a Samsung Galaxy S, iPhone4 or a Motorola Milestone 2, all of which are infinitely more usable. Simply put, the N8 is a great camera but an average phone. We’d want to wait and watch for the E7 which is expected to launch in December.

(Image credits – Nokia and GSM Arena. The press shots were just waiting to be LOL’d. So I did. Also A Raja, our cabinet minister who is accused of guzzling $40Bn might trend on Twitter any time now. Geez, I feel like such a sellout.)