Nokia N8 review: 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 official photos
The Finnish engineers often like to make a point about Symbian being
the most resource-effective OS. We’ve seen it run reasonably fast indeed
on even slower CPUs. This time though it’s Symbian ^3, so we’ll have to
see it again to believe it.
Key features
- Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support
- Penta-band 3G with 10.2 Mbps HSDPA and 2 Mbps HSUPA support
- Sleek anodized aluminum unibody
- 3.5" 16M-color AMOLED capacitive touchscreen of 640 x 360 pixel resolution
- 12 megapixel autofocus camera with xenon flash and 720p@25fps video recording
- Camera features: large 1/1.83” camera sensor, mechanical shutter, ND filter, geo-tagging, face detection
- Symbian^3 OS
- 680 MHz ARM 11 CPU and 256 MB RAM
- Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n
- microHDMI port for 720p TV-out functionality
- GPS receiver with A-GPS support and free lifetime voice-guided navigation
- Digital compass
- 16GB on-board storage, expandable through the microSD card slot
- Active noise cancellation with a dedicated mic
- DivX and XviD video support
- Built-in accelerometer and proximity sensor
- Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
- Stereo FM Radio with RDS, FM transmitter
- microUSB port with USB On-the-go support
- Flash and Java support for the web browser
- Stereo Bluetooth 3.0
- Nice audio reproduction quality
- Smart and voice dialing
- Scratch resistant Gorilla glass display
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- Camera interface is decidedly outdated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.
Nokia N8 at ours
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.
Belle was a huge jump forward in usability for
the OS formerly known as Symbian. Now, older models that launched with
the tired Symbian^3 and spent some time with Anna, as is the case with
the Nokia N8, can finally join their newer brethren.
There's not much we haven't covered in our Belle review, but it's interesting to see how the latest version handles on the old hardware.
Perhaps we should begin with a few words about installing the update.
It weighs in at around 300MB and you'll need to hook up your phone to a
computer running Nokia Suite (3.3 or later) to install it.
Everything runs pretty smoothly - you can
almost forget that you're working with a single 680MHz processor with
256MB RAM. Actually, if you compare this video with the one
we shot for Symbian Anna (on the exact same N8 unit), you'll see how
much better the browser handles - there's practically no visible
redrawing when panning.
Nokia Belle brings refined browser UI
We tried running a few benchmarks and they both showed modest
improvements. BrowserMark went from 21K to 25K, while Acid3 went 2
points over the 91/100 score that Anna gets on the N8.
The camera also got a performance boost in Belle, it can now shoot
720p videos at 30fps, however that's no news for the Nokia N8 as it had a
special update just for it since Anna.
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