Nokia 8800 Carbon Arte Review

Home screen	Main menu

Interface:

In this department, we are up for a surprise. Nokia 8800 Carbon Arte runs on the Symbian S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 OS! We’re just kidding. As all previous models of the series, it works with the Series 40 and lacks any enhancements not seen in the original Arte. We have the same six themes, with five of them being interactive (change according to the time). Only their colors have been slightly modified in order to change the vision of the phone.

Details about the phonebook, organizer and messages you can get in the review of the regular Arte. The most substantial change is in the integrated memory. You now get 4 instead of 1GB.

Like the previous two models of the Arte line, Carbon is a tri-band GSM, which will probably be a disappointment for the luxury phone aficionados in the U.S., because they won’t be able to fully take advantage of the device. If you live in Europe however, you’ll enjoy the high-speed 3G support. We also recommend using the preloaded Opera Mini, and not the regular browser, because it loads faster and easily opens large pages. Its main drawback is that it doesn’t have a mode where you can view the content as on a PC, but let’s not forget that this is not an Internet oriented phone.

Camera interface

Camera and multimedia:

The fact that Nokia 8800 Carbon Arte is a high-end luxury phone doesn’t mean that it lacks multimedia functionality. Being true to the series, it sports a 3.2-megapixel camera for pictures and 640x480 videos with up to 15 fps. Although the quality of the results offered by both elements cannot be compared to to other cameraphones with the same resolution, they will do the job.





Music-wise the phone performs much better with the same player seen in the non-smart XpressMusic line. It allows you to sort your tunes by artist, album, genre and visualizes album art covers. The sound quality is excellent and we felt like pimps listening to “Got Money “ by Lil Wayne and T-Pain.
 

The same menu allows you to play videos as well. The phone played easily H.264 MPEG4s in QVGA and at 30 fps, which is acceptable for such a device.