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• Camera interface is decidedly outdated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.