Nokia N8 REVIEW

Nokia’s reputation as a leader in the smartphone market has been under increasing pressure in recent years, as a string of ‘high end’ handsets have failed to capture the minds and wallets of the phone-buying public.
So to fix that, Nokia’s gone back to the drawing board to bring out the Nokia N8, featuring a new OS and a huge amount of high end tech packed under the hood.
Having announced the phone back in April, Nokia has been holding off on release to make sure the user experience is as good as possible.But it needs to be very good indeed seeing as most other brands announce a phone then release it within weeks – we’ve been waiting nearly half a year for this one.
The underlying software has been improved and Symbian^3 builds on the previous iterations of the OS seen on the likes of the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and Nokia X6, but adds in multiple home screens, widgets and an improved UI.
Hardware-wise, Nokia has pushed the boat out too with the new N8, offering a full metal chassis with anodised scratch-proof paint to give the phone a really high end feel.
It really is scratch-proof – rubbing keys on it produced no ill-effects, although the slider switch on the side can get its paint rubbed off over time.
However, with a 12MP camera with Xenon flash bolted on the back, it’s not a super-slim device – it fits in the hand well enough but the dimensions 113.5 x 59 x 12.9 mm aren’t going to rival the likes of the iPhone 4 and the Samsung Galaxy S, especially when being forced into more tightly fitting trousers.
The Nokia N8 also doesn’t have a removable battery either – the full metal chassis is completely enclosed so unless you’ve got a very particular screwdriver, you’re not getting in to replace any innards.
The rest of the Nokia N8 continues the higher-end feel: the 3.5-inch capacitive OLED screen really pops with colour (although doesn’t quite match the impressive sharpness of Samsung’s Super AMOLED) and the minimalistic design sees only one rather functional-looking button on the front, eschewing the extra soft keys Nokia has implemented for so many years.
The top of the N8 is where it mostly happens though – there’s a mini HD port, the 3.5mm headphone jack and the power switch, which is also used to quickly change profiles when buzzing through the N8′s interface.
The bottom houses the charger port – and it’s a standard 2mm ‘new Nokia charger’ port, which initially seems like an odd choice when you can also charge through the microUSB port too, like all other phones, even when connected to a PC.
We can only assume that Nokia has done this so that when you’re streaming over USB on the go (more on that later) you can keep charging the phone too.