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| Nokia N8 Review |
Nokia N8 is the first Symbian^3 OS based smartphone from Nokia. It is also the first smartphone from Nokia with 12 MP camera and HD video recording capability. Take a look at this detailed review of Nokia N8.
Performance
Nokia N8 runs on a single core ARM11 CPU clocked at 680MHz. That's a bit slower in terms of clock speed than the top Android phones, but Nokia's OS and software tend to be very lightweight. The phone has 256 MB of RAM (that's at the low end of the smartphone scale) and 16 GB of flash storage. There's a microSD card slot too.
Overall, the N8's speed was acceptable and sometimes fast. But the phone lagged here and there for a second. Future firmware updates might improve performance. This is not a slow phone, but it's not lightning-fast like the new Samsung S8500 Wave smartphone.
Multimedia
The photo viewer is attractive and fast. The app responds quickly to the accelerometer and resizing images is quick. The video player handles MPEG4, Flash, WMV9 and RealVideo formats. The widescreen display is particularly well-suited to movie playback and viewing angles and brightness are excellent. Since this is an AMOLED display, colors are very saturated, making photos and video look even better.
The music player has a pleasant interface and it supports a variety of popular formats including AAC and MP3. Nokia has their own Ovi Music Store with many millions of tracks. Sound quality is quite good via a good set of headphones and the speaker is notably better than average. You can stream tunes to your car radio using the phone's FM transmitter, and there's an FM radio as well with RDS and station detection.
Battery
The Nokia N8 is the only Nokia I can recall that doesn't have a user replaceable battery. Nokia states that it can easily be replaced at a service center. The phone has exceptional battery life by high end smartphone standards. The N8 can charge over USB.
Camera
As a camera phone, the Nokia N8 is simply the best on the market. Nokia has been a leader in high end phone photography, starting with the iconic Nokia N95 and its then ground-breaking 5 megapixel autofocus camera.It also has the ability to record HD videos.
Design
N8 has solid build quality with the brushed aluminum finish. It feels sturdy and solid on hand. N8 is fairly thin and not not feels heavy in hands. It has 3.5" multi-touch capacitive AMOLED display with a resolution of 360 x 640 pixels. AMOLED screen has a high contrast and saturation ratio. It can not compared with samsung's Super AMOLED displays but still pretty good.
Pros
Superb camera, vibrant multi-touch display, excellent call quality, lots of internal storage, Solid build quality with the brushed aluminum finish, Smooth 720p video playback.
Cons
Symbian^3 OS is modern but not captivating, phone sometimes lags, browser is sometimes sluggish, battery isn't user replaceable, Apps variety on Ovi store still not as good as Android Market or Apple App Store.
Video Review
Take a look at this video review of Nokia N8 by MobileTechReview.
Specifications
Screen: 3.5" multi-touch capacitive AMOLED display. Screen size diagonally: 3.5". Resolution: 360 x 640, accelerometer, proximity and ambient light sensors.
Battery: 1200 mAh Lithium Ion battery. Not user replaceable.
Hardware: 680MHz ARM11 single core processor. 256 MB RAM. 16 GB storage.
Dimension: 4.47 x 2.78 x 0.53 inches. Weight: 4.67 ounces.
Data: Quad band unlocked GSM world phone with GSM/GPRS/EDGE on the 850/900/1800/1900MHz bands. WCDMA/HSDPA/HSUPA on the 850/900/1700/1900/2100MHz bands.
Camera: Main camera: 12 MP with Carl Zeiss autofocus lens and Xenon flash. Max photo resolution 4000 x3000 pixels. Video resolution is 720p (1280 x 720) at 25fps in MPEG4 H.264 format. Secondary camera: VGA 640 x 480 resolution).
AV: 3.5mm standard stereo headphone jack. Has micro HDMI port (cable included). FM radio and FM transmitter. Supported video playback formats: Flash, RealVideo 10, Sorenson Spark, WMV9, 3GPP, MPEG4 H.263 and H.264. Music formats: MP3, AAC, AC-3, eAAC, AAC+, eAAC+, EFR and WMA.
Networking: Integrated WiFi 802.11b/g/n and Bluetooth 3.0 supporting the following profiles: A2DP, AVRCP, BIP, DUN, FTP, GAP, GAVDP, GOEP, HFP, HSP, OPP, PBAP, SAP, SPP.
Software: Symbian OS ^3. Full HTML 4.1 web browser with support for WAP, Flash Lite 4.0. Zip utility, Adobe PDF viewer, QuickOffice viewer (compatible with MS Office 2007 and earlier), Ovi Maps, Ovi Store, YouTube player,Facebook and Twitter.
