Review : Nokia N8-Director of photography

Introduction

We’ve come to take Nokia for granted in the low end or the business class but it seems it has lost the knack for killer phones, run out of royal blood. It’s up to the Nseries to fix it all up. The Nokia N8 may just turn out to be the right cure. With that kind of hardware, it’s a smartphone you’d be mad to ignore. For a change we are not talking netbook-grade processing power or loads of RAM. Nokia have instead given their flagship an industry-leading camera and stuff like HDMI port and USB-On-the-Go.

Nokia N8 Specs and Features

• 12 Mega-Pixel Autofocus Camera w/ Carl Zeiss Optics, Xenon flash, Face recognition
• 3.5 inches AMOLED capacitive touch screen at 16:9 nHD (640 x 360 pixels) resolution, 16.7 million colours
• 256MB RAM, 512MB ROM
• 16 GB internal memory/built-in storage
• MicroSD memory card slot, hot swappable, up to 48 GB
• Dual cam, secondary camera for video calls (VGA, 640 x 480 pixels)
• High-definition digital 720p resolution
• Bluetooth 2.1 w/ A2DP
• Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n
• Symbian ^3 operating system
• Flash Lite 4.0 that supports a majority of Flash Player 10.1 content
• ARM 11 680MHz processor
• 3D Graphics HW accelerator
• FM Radio with RDS, FM transmitter
• HDMI connection to connect Nokia N8 to home theater system
• Premium-quality Dolby Digital Plus Technology
• GPS w/ aGPS support
• HSDPA Cat9, maximum speed up to 10.2 Mbps, HSUPA Cat5 2.0 Mbps
• 1200mAh Li-Po battery
• Video calling, Video editing, Video ring tones
• MP3, WMA, AAC, eAAC, eAAC+, AMR-NB, AMR-WB, E-AC-3, AC-3; Bit rate up to 320 kbps
• Integrated social networking with a Facebook & Twitter app - Nokia Social client
• Social networking: Profiles visible in phone contacts, events visible in phone calendar
• Full web browsing of real web pages with touch control
• WebTV, Office document editors, Video & photo editor, Mail, Chat etc.

Main disadvantages

• Symbian^3 is still behind Android and iOS usability standards
• No video light
• Camera interface is decidedly outdated
• Relatively limited 3rd party software availability
• No office document editing (without a paid upgrade)
• Video player has some issues
• Battery life is not on par with best in the business
• Battery is not user-replaceable

There’s certainly a lot of pressure on the Nokia N8. People are probably expecting more from it than the very guys who designed it. But the N8 was never meant to compete with the iPhone 4 or the Galaxy S. At least, that’s what Nokia will gladly have you believe.
You see, with the Nokia N8 it’s not about who the competition is. Not about the business benefits of a smartphone, not about the available apps. It’s about the best camera in the business. Now, we’ll have to see about that. Again.

 The N8 already managed to put a dedicated digicam to shame in our recent blind test. But it will take more than that to get the thumbs up at the end of a full review. The camera is certainly impressive but it’s the overall balance and bang-for-buck that count most in our books here so the N8 better have more aces up its sleeve.

Design and construction

Sleek aluminum on the sides and the back and a large AMOLED touchscreen up front – there’s nothing to dislike about the N8. If you have a thing for phones made of metal you will absolutely love it.
For the time of our review we managed to obtain four of the five color options of anodized scratch-proof paint available (we’re only the blue one short of a grand slam).
We can’t force ourselves of course to call them all equally attractive. The Dark Grey and Silver are definitely our favorites but we’re sure that the Green and especially the Orange will find their fans too.
There were obviously enough users who liked them. Each got more than 10 percent approval in the Nokia Conversations recent poll.

The front panel of the Nokia N8 is mostly taken by the 3.5” AMOLED display of nHD resolution. Tapered sides and sloping top and bottom make the handset quite comfortable to handle, both portrait and landscape. Unfortunately, the bezel around the screen is a bit too wide for our taste.
Anyway, 3.5” is a good enough size for a contemporary touch phone. And this one has several firsts to Nokia’s credit. The Finns debuted capacitive touchscreen tech on the X6 but only now is Nokia introducing multi-touch support.
Another first is a Nokia AMOLED display to remain perfectly legible under direct sunlight. Previous attempts were pretty poor on a bright sunny day, but this time they got it right.
The indoor image quality, as is to be expected from an AMOLED unit, is pretty good with deep blacks and nicely saturated colors. Not as impressive as Samsung’s SuperAMOLED screens, but certainly competitive elsewhere.
The Nokia N8 has standard screen resolution. At 360 x 640, the Nokia N8 has 44 percent less pixels than the best Android displays (854 x 480 pixels) and just over a third of the iPhone 4 pixel count (960 x 640 pixels).

The N8 display compared to the iPhone 4 Retina unit

 Not everyone needs that kind of pixel density though, and some users probably won’t even be able to notice the difference. We do, that's for sure.
The N8 screen sensitivity is as good as we’ve come to expect from capacitive units.
Vibration feedback does deserve a mention however as it seems impressively well tweaked and does improve the user experience in a surprisingly nice way. Haptics are enabled even when you scroll lists and the icons bump against the end of the screen or when you zoom in on a video using the virtual buttons.
Moving on, we notice the video-call camera in the upper right corner above the display. Near it are the ambient light and the proximity sensors, as well as the centrally placed earpiece.

Symbian^3 user interface

The Nokia N8 is the pioneer of the new Symbian^3 OS, which according to Nokia should be the first step in the company’s fightback against Android and iOS. We wish it could somehow magically leapfrog the two currently leading platforms but those things just don’t happen overnight.
Of course they might have gone for a total overhaul by starting from scratch as Microsoft did but that would mean losing a lot of functionality and that’s probably the reason Nokia went for the evolutionary, rather than the revolutionary way.
The new OS is certainly not up with the best just yet but is certainly a step in the right direction. The Finnish software engineers finally realized that it’s a streamlined interface that people want and got rid of the whole tap-to-select-another-tap-to-activate non-sense approach that made Symbian^1 so inconsistent.
There are still some traces of that illogical interface in the camera interface, but we are hoping those will be gone soon too.

The new OS also brings some nice UI layout and functionality changes. The homescreen is the most evident of those, its size now expanded to three panes worth of space. You are then free to fill them up with widgets and then rearrange them as you see fit. If three panels are too much for you, you can also delete some of them.

 

Impressive audio output

Nokia N8's multimedia prowess wouldn't be complete without high quality audio output. Fortunately, the handset managed to deliver on that one too, achieving some excellent scores in our traditional test. And the thing is pretty loud too.
When attached to an active external amplifier (i.e. your car stereo or your home audio system) the Nokia N8 performs greatly with no weak points whatsoever.
There wasn't much quality deterioration when we plugged in headphones either. Sure, the stereo crosstalk got a bit worse and we recorded some intermodulation distortion but those are rather hard to detect in anything but lab conditions.

Nokia n8 frequency response

Final words

The Nokia N8 is the best Nokia has to offer. A few years back thousands of people would take this to mean the best on the market. Things are not that simple today and Nokia has been learning it the hard way. But the company has been learning.
It’s been a long losing streak for Nokia in the game of touch phones. You can’t expect it to suddenly turn the game around and start beating the snot out of the competition. It makes much more sense to try and be better one step at a time. The best camera in business is one such step.
We’ve given up looking for the ultimate smartphone, haven’t we? The Nokia N8 most certainly isn’t in contention there. And Symbian ^3 is not the best touchscreen experience you can get – although what’s fair is fair – it’s an improvement over S60 5th. And the Ovi store isn’t the best app market, but the guys behind it try really hard.
Symbian sucks on touchscreen – yeah, but there are some nice multimedia features. The web browser is not that good – yeah, but you get USB-on-the-go. There are better screens out there – but no better cameras. Not necessarily in this order.
The Nokia N8 seems capable of sustaining balance. In one particular area, it’s the unquestioned winner. Elsewhere, it’s just fair – there are ups and downs all along its spec sheet. As always, it boils down to picking your priorities.

 

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Review : Nokia X6 : Going up the ladder

In the world of Nokia it's all about evolution, rather than revolution. So don't expect the specs on the X6 to blow your mind. The handset is the next step for the market leader scrambling to make up for a late start in touch- screens. 

To be honest, the Symbian S60 touch edition has been struggling to catch up with the standard setters in terms of user experience. And the X6 claims to have the answer: the responsiveness only a capacitive screen can bring.

 The Nokia X6 is also the first XpressMusic handset to head straight for the high-end. Midrange is the highest the music Finns have gone so we are interested to see how this change of approach works. Nokia have always had a strong appeal to the masses, but pleasing the selected few is undoubtedly harder. 

Key features:

• Quad-band GSM support
• Tri-band 3G with HSDPA support
• 3.2" 16M-color TFT LCD 16:9 capacitive touchscreen (360 x 640 pixels)
• Symbian S60 5th edition UI
• ARM 11 434 MHz CPU, 128 MB of RAM memory
• 5 megapixel autofocus camera with dual-LED flash
• VGA video recording at 30fps
• Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, UPnP technology
• Built-in GPS receiver
• 32GB built-in storage
• FM radio with RDS
• Bluetooth and USB (standard microUSB connector) v2.0
• 3.5mm standard audio jack
• Very good audio quality
• Proximity sensor for screen auto turn-off
• Accelerometer sensor for automatic UI rotation and motion-based gaming
• Stereo speakers
• TV out
• "Comes with music" edition gives you a year of all-you-can-eat music subscription
• Landscape on-screen virtual QWERTY keyboard
• Ovi Maps 3.0 Touch
• Further Ovi and MySpace service integration (direct image and video uploads)
• Most regional retail packages include a set of the great Nokia WH-500 headphones

Main disadvantages:

• X6 is still quite pricey (around 500 euro at the time of writing)
• UI is still immature with somewhat inconsistent user experience
• Touch web browser not quite polished and with dodgy Flash support
• No voice-guided navigation license
• No office document viewer preinstalled
• Doesn't charge off microUSB
• Very poor sunlight legibility
• Slow image gallery
• No DivX/XviD support for the video player
• No microSD card slot (as a connectivity solution)

As you can see in the two lists above there is almost nothing new in the software package, so it all falls on the hardware to justify the high asking price. The well-stuffed retail package is a great place to start but does the capacitive screen improve usability enough to be worth the extra money over, say, the 5800 XpressMusic? And the difference in price is by no means trivial.

In the increasingly competitive touchscreen market manufacturers don't have much room for error. The unpolished S60 UI is enough of a burden already, so Nokia X6 has to be near perfect in every other respect. A tall task indeed, but let's see how they've tackled it. 

Design and construction

The Nokia X6 looks pretty nice with its opaque plastic finish. You can't be too imaginative when designing a full-touch handset but a huge display up front always has a positive impact on a handset's look.

Nokia X6 next to the 5800 XpressMusic

User interface is the same, despite the new touchscreen

As far as touchscreens go, the Nokia X6 is a first for Nokia -it's their first capacitive touchscreen phone. The S60 5th edition hoever hasn't changed at all. So, by now you should have seen plenty touch Symbian OS reviews and nothing here should come as a big surprise.

New touch technology, old software

 The first thing to note is kinetic scrolling which, in fact, works quite well and is available almost throughout the user interface - from file browser through gallery to contacts (and even web browser, though with quite spotty implementation). Unfortunately, it won't work in icon menus, like the main menu.
In those icon-centric menus you push the selection to the edge of the screen, which will scroll things in the opposite direction. It's very unintuitive and confusing, since everything else works the other way around. You can use the scroll bar for icon menus, but scrollbars are so 1990s.
Still, the good news is that finger scrolling has been improved everywhere as far as lists of items are concerned. You can scroll with the same ease as with the Apple iPhone - you push it one way and it moves in the oppsite direction as if you are pushing the actual list off the screen.
On the homescreen, the Contacts bar is side-scrollable and thus accommodates a lot more phonebook shortcuts.
Turning the handset landscape in text-input mode automatically brings a full QWERTY keypad up on the screen. Of course, there's still a long way to go. We'd still have to wait for auto-rotation of the homescreen, smart dial and a more elaborate Active Standby - with room for the WLAN scanner plugin, for instance.
Widgets are NSeries stuff so don't expect any of those here. And if you were expecting thumb-scrollable multiple homescreen panes, then you are out of luck as well, despite the fact that the touchscreen competition has had these for a long time.
S60 5th is in essence a direct translation of D-pad and soft-key action into touch. Although it has its benefits, the result is hardly the most fluent and intuitive touchscreen interface there is. Scrolling and accessing items across the interface is nothing like other touch platforms we've tried. On the other hand, soft-keys work just fine and enhance usability compared to other touch phones.
So, the user experience with S60 5th is a mixed bag and what you think of it will entirely depend on your background. If you know your way around S60, you'll be quite at home with the X6 interface. But if you come from an alternative touchscreen platform you'll find yourself climbing a fairly steep learning curve.
Opening an item in any of the listed submenus requires not one, but two presses - one to select, and another one to confirm the action. Now that's something that you don't normally see in other touch phones. You get used to it with time, but the main issue here is that the interface logic is different when you deal with icons instead of lists.When the opened menu uses icons to represent items as opposed to lists, then a single click usually does the job.
The scrolling as described earlier is equally confusing due to the two contradictory approaches. At least kinetic scrolling will make you feel way more comfortable than those first 5800 XpressMusic users. Plus, it does at least show Nokia are serious about polishing the Symbian touch platform.
Homescreen and main menu
The main menu structure leaves no doubt you're on Symbian turf. Icons are set in a 3 x 4 grid or a list and you can freely reorder. Screen orientation can be set to change automatically thanks to the accelerometer.
The homescreen, however, is one spot where auto-rotation is badly missed as the extra screen estate would've made it much more usable. For one, more shortcuts would've been visible on the Contacts bar. It's scrollable anyway - that's true - but if the 5730 XpressMusic can do it, why can't the touchscreen version?
Otherwise, the homescreen layout of the X6 is typical Symbian and looks exactly the same as it did on the Nokia 5530.
A single press on the clock starts the clock application (with an option for setting up an alarm) while tapping on the date opens a drop-down menu where you can either launch the calendar application or change the currently active profile, which does make using the the Power key for that purpose redundant.

Calendar, profiles and clock just a touch away

 You can also access the connectivity menu from here by tapping around the battery status indicator, which is the quickest way to initiate a WLAN search. It is not quite as quick as the 3rd edition plug-in where you only needed a single click for that purpose but it is better than nothing.
The Contacts bar follows right beneath: each contact is represented by the contact photo and their first name - and it's possible to have three contacts displayed at a time but the list is scrollable left or right.
For each contact you can add an RSS feed, so we guess it is a nice trick to add a contact that isn't a person just so that you'll have quick access to your favorite feeds on the homescreen.
Selecting a contact from the Contact bar brings up a screen with info on the contact (different from you get if you select the contact from the Contacts list). It has the contact photo, name and phone number. Underneath are four buttons - call, send message, update feed and settings.
Further down is an area that shows the communication history for that contact - both calls and messages. And finally, at the bottom there are the top two lines from an RSS feed.

Final words

A first capacitive screen for Nokia and a first truly high-end device in the XpressMusic lineup, the X6 is a smartphone that requires attention. It's good that Nokia do try and improve their touchscreens and respond to users' demands.
Yet we don't think the screen sensitivity is the main problem of the Nokia touch phones. Resistive screens have strengths of their own (better accuracy, stylus use and handwriting, etc.) over capacitive ones, so it's more about picking your priorities rather than ranking the two technologies.
Don't get us wrong - we are pleased with Nokia for giving their users a choice. It's great that they are creating handsets for different customers, rather than relying on the one-size-fit-all approach. However, there are other issues that need more urgent attention and we believe Nokia should focus their efforts there.
That focus should be the software on their smartphones, of course. The S60 UI is neither user-friendly nor attractive enough to rival the best in class. The core functionality is all there but when we are talking about that much money, only covering the basics just doesn't cut it.
The Nokia X6 is an expensive device all right (around 500 euro), even if we discount the Comes With Music license and the great headphones. And at this price point the flaws are not easily forgiven. Competition in this segment is tough to start with, and the fact that there's too many affordable alternatives with comparable feature sets doesn't help either.

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