Nokia N8 Review

Introduction:

The Nokia N8 can be likened to the second coming, not because it’s necessarily salvation in a phone, but more so because it’s taken a really, really long time to get here. Since it was officially announced back in April 2010, with leaks out in September 2009, we’ve all been waiting for Symbian Foundation’s follow up to S60 V5, and Nokia’s follow up to the Nokia N97. Finally, here it is, in all its anodised aluminium glory, with a 12MP camera with Xenon flash and an OLED screen, the new Nokia flagship phone for 2010/2011 - the Nokia N8.

In the box, as well as the phone itself there is a charger, a miniHDMI to HDMI connector, two microUSB to USB cables (one female USB, one male USB), a set of headphones, a power charger and some literature on the phone.

Design:

The Nokia N8 feels special. With an anodised aluminium body, it delivers a really luxurious cold metal sensation when you pick it up, and a fantastic weighting behind it. It is truly a tactile pleasure to hold and fondle and would still be even if it didn't switch on.



You can compare the Nokia N8 with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

The only areas of the Nokia N8 not encased in anodised aluminium are its ends. Both top and toe are instead covered by slick, super-glossy plastic strips sporting the headphone jack, miniHDMI port, and power button at the top with the bottom end containing the proprietary Nokia charging port. These offer a visual and tactile contrast to the rest of the phone's body, however, like most things glossy, love fingerprints.


The Nokia N8's front side marries glass and aluminium, with the screen, front facing camera, light sensor and menu button found on the fascia. A thin, semi-gloss 3mm strip of metal frames the glass front, inside which is the 3.5-inch AMOLED screen with a resolution of 360x640 pixels.

The screen of the Nokia N8 shines. There is little jaw-dropping about it in terms of specs, with similarly spec'd screens having been available on phones for nigh on two years (i.e. the Samsung OMNIA HD). The N8's screen nevertheless performs exceptionally well with above average pixel density, very vibrant colours and fantastic viewing angles. 3.5 inches is a decent size for the screen of the phone touted as Nokia's multimedia powerhouse. Well, of course, a bigger screen with a higher resolution would better show off the on-board 12MP camera and make web-browsing that bit more enjoyable, however, Nokia have decided to go with 'pocket-friendly' rather than 'computer in the pocket'. In turn, what you're left with what is distinctly a phone, not a PMP or a tablet wannabe, but a smart phone with a good, sharp, bright screen.


The anodised aluminium body has a novel shape, like something out of a Megaman videogame, it's got a retro look coupled with a futuristic feel. In addition to looking and feeling refined, it's also quite practical. The flat top and bottom make it easy to pick up, handle and even stand in portrait orientation. The curved edges feel complementary as they are smooth for comfortable hand holding, an ergonomic touch that makes the buttons on the right hand side a breeze to press. On the right is a volume rocker, a small, ribbed sliding button to lock / unlock the Nokia N8, and a camera button. There are no buttons on the left of the phone, however you will find the microUSB port which remains uncovered, as well as the SIM card and microSD card slots located under two flaps. These flaps close nice and flush with the N8's body and despite being plastic, have the same matted feel as the aluminium body, making for a smooth, unnoticeable addition. With no removable battery, there are also small screws visible on either side of the phone, which are neither here nor there. While we are tempted to say they add to the industrial, sturdy design of the Nokia N8, they also manage to detract from the minimal finish.


Another component that detracts from the minimal design, and at the same time, reiterates the aesthetic novelty factor of the Nokia N8 is its back. Flat and clean for the most part, it is almost a simple reflection of the phone's front, except for a curiously raised rectangle of functionality jutting out of the top half, housing the camera, flash and loud speaker. As with the rest of the Nokia N8, the finish is such that it feels too solid and considered to question. The raised element on the back means the phone won't sit flat, but this has been needed in order to make the larger sensor possible. One thing that is for sure though, love it or hate it, the N8's build quality is way, way up there with the best.

Interface:

Symbian^3 has been the subject of much speculation over the past months, so is it a break-away from what made Symbian S60 V5 feel dated? Can it springboard Nokia’s touchscreen phones into the current generation of user interfaces? Does it offer something unique that no other mobile OS does? All these questions can be delved into now that we’ve got Symbian^3 on a premium handset in front of us, the Nokia N8.

Our Nokia N8 review unit is currently in standby mode. There is a large, semi-illuminated analogue clock displayed on the screen, which immediately adds a nice element of thoughtfulness to the OS. Unlock the phone and it’s bye bye, clock; hello, bright screen and... Symbian S60 V5? The multiple home-screens alone convey very little change between Symbian^3 and its predecessor, with 3 screens, each with a grid of 8 spaces for optional widgets that can be added or removed by a long press. The bottom part of the homescreen contains three keys: options (relating to homescreen options only), homescreen switcher (indicated by three dots) and call (bringing up the dialer). The menu is accessed using the physical button to the bottom left of the Nokia N8’s screen, though a shortcut to the menu can be added to the homescreen, if you prefer.


There are a host of live widgets to choose from pre-loaded on the Nokia N8, such as RSS newsfeeds and mail, as well as static shortcuts. Notice anything different yet? No, neither did we.

Nevertheless, unlike a lot of “old” Nokia touchscreen phones, the Nokia N8 doesn’t have a habit of lagging. With numerous apps plodding along in the background, including Opera browser, music player, camera and gallery, transitions between the homescreens remained smooth, and we could comfortably add and remove widgets with no slow down. The range of widgets on our unit wasn't as extensive as we hoped it would be (RSS feeds, favourite contacts, radio, email, notifications, phone setup, search, social networks, time/profile, WLAN). There are more available through the Ovi Store, though this doesn’t really cut it when a lot of people will want a fun and functional range of things to put on their homescreens out of the box. Widgets are a fixed size, so information heavy widgets can’t take up two cells for example. This means the Facebook widget is very squashed, while the shortcut widget isn’t. A disappointing aesthetic contrast which conflicts with the harmonious physical design of the Nokia N8. Another gripe we have with the widgets is the shortcut widget. You can only insert shortcuts in groups of four, even when you only want one, further cluttering your homescreen.

Homescreens can be added up to a maximum of three and a minimum of one, with the option to have a different wallpaper on each homescreen which we like a lot. Slide between homescreens to activate the smooth fading transition between wallpapers, working well against the sliding widgets.

Activate the menu, and once again, we’re very hard pressed to see the marked evolution from Symbian S60 V5. It’s smoother and slicker with consistent kinetic scrolling and single tapping throughout, but this is more what we might expect from a firmware update coupled with much speedier hardware than a newly-revised OS. Symbian Foundation has clearly gone with the “if it ain’t broke” approach. The question is, is it broke?


The Nokia N8 has a comprehensive organizer. The calendar is finger-friendly, classically in line with Nokia’s styling and easy to get around, with standard viewing options (week, day, month)and easy appointment entry. We wish it was easier to sync with our Google Calendar (in the same way Gmail now is) but this needs to be done through Mail for Exchange.


Contacts are easy to navigate through with kinetic scrolling implemented throughout. Selecting a contact will give you a range of options such as voice call, message, email, video call, find on map and social network. Upon pressing social network, you can manually link your contact with their online profile, pulling their contact picture and giving you quick access to their profile. The integration of this feature could have extended deeper however. There is no option to automate a sync between social networks and phone contacts, and no live information about the contacts is updated automatically. The Nokia N8’s contacts are also like the calendar, not syncing with our Google Contacts, only with Ovi Contacts. Once again however, this can be remedied by the slightly unintuitive Mail for Exchange support.

Messaging on the Nokia N8 is improved. With texts viewable as conversations as well as isolated messages, the whole experience feels more unified than before. The on-screen keyboard is numeric in portrait and QWERTY in landscape. There is the nice addition of left and right arrow to the numeric pad, and more room dedicated to the text with a slightly smaller font size and less superfluous buttons than S60 V5. In landscape, the QWERTY keyboard also takes up less screen room, leaving more to what matters - the message. Keys may be smaller, but it is very usable and we found ourselves making very few mistakes, even when we first started using it. There is also optional haptic feedback that can be manually set to one of three strengths.



Offering a huge range of functionality, the clear answer to the earlier question is no, Symbian^3 isn’t broke, however, it hasn’t had the amount of change we feel it needed either. Symbian^3 is much better than older Symbian iterations, with numerous under the hood tweaks implemented seamlessly to make the whole experience better. The problem is, the tweaks are often too un-obvious. For a consumer that wants clear tangible benefits to choosing a specific OS, the Symbian^3 interface doesn’t step up its game enough.

Camera and Multimedia:

If there was ever a time for a drum-roll, this is it. It’s time to take a close look at the Nokia N8's 12MP camera with auto focus Carl Zeiss lens (28mm f2.8). Nokia commissioned the University of Westminster, a university with a strong photographic heritage in London, to conduct research into the Nokia N8’s sensor. Nokia World 2010 touted the N8 as a compact camera replacement. There has been so much buzz surrounding this camera, that it really has to be something special to live up to it all, and by golly it is.

Quick to activate, quick to fire (even with flash), quick to process, when we first started taking pictures, the speed at which the Nokia N8 worked made us think it was set to a low resolution. That wasn’t the case. At full 12MP, everything works, and works quickly. The camera button on the bottom right of the N8 has two stages of press (focus and capture) and this can be used to take the picture. Alternatively, there is a single camera icon on the screen that can be used. The camera has face detection, an optional on-screen grid, as well as the following:

• Scene modes (auto, user defined, close-up, portrait, landscape, sport, night and night-portrait)
• Self timer (off, 2 seconds, 10 seconds, 20 seconds),
• Colour tone (normal, vivid, black and white, sepia),
• White balance (auto, sunny, cloudy, incandescent, fluorescent)
• Exposure (-2 to +2 in increments of 0.5)
• ISO (low, medium, high)
• Adjustable contrast
• Sharpness (hard, normal, soft)

Pictures taken on the Nokia N8 are indistinguishable from some of the mid-range compact cameras on the market at the moment, and are unquestionably better than most entry-level compacts.

Colour reproduction is good. While on the AMOLED screen, images look slightly over-saturated, but when exported to a monitor, reds and yellows in particular look bright and natural.

As you can see from the samples, levels of detail are high across busy images, especially in shots taken in daylight. Thanks to the 12MP sensor and Nokia’s efforts, images don’t break down as soon as they are zoomed into, so there is some leeway in terms of cropping an image once it is taken.

Exposure levels are also very promising. With the shot of the two statues providing a low contrast scene on a slightly overcast day, the Nokia N8 produced a capture very similar to the real thing.

An area the Nokia N8 camera is a little weaker is dynamic range. When faced with a high contrast scene, as with most compact cameras, shades of black melt into one, and highlights can become blotches of white. Another factor is metering. The Nokia N8 doesn’t enable the user to set metering, so it is defaulted to centre-weighted.




The Nokia N8 impressed us with its noise handling. Of course it produces noise, but it does a very good job of minimizing it. Unlike the Motorola Milestone XT720 for example (another Xenon flash camera phone), which softened images to death in order to reduce noise (and still produced more than the Nokia N8), darker images retain a degree of sharpness and there is no blotching or banding of colour. The flash will also come in handy for dark situations.


Staring at macro shots from the Nokia N8 was also a pleasure. With a decent aperture, the N8 can deliver a pretty shallow depth of field when in macro. In addition, levels of detail it picks up are superb, with a minimum focusing distance of about 15cm.



Indoors, the Nokia N8’s great sensor coupled with its Xenon flash can actually light up a small room and produce a decent picture in the process. It is the perfect imaging companion for someone who doesn’t want to carry two gadgets around. The images taken in the restaurant were all in full auto and came out great, as did 99% of the images taken on the N8. Between its usability and quality, it really is the first camera-phone that has stood up against some mid-range compact cameras and won, both in terms of quality and usability.



Photo editing options are as follows: rotate, resize, crop, add clipart, distort, draw upon, speech bubble, frame, red-eye correction, stamp, colour effects, tuning and animate. All these worked well on the go, providing a good amount of versatility to photos once you’ve taken them.


Viewing photos taken on the Nokia N8's camera can be done in the phone’s photo browser. This is displayed in a standard grid, and once an image is selected, zooming can be achieved by both pinch to zoom and double tap. With the nature of the 12MP images captured by the Nokia N8, they are big and zooming in and out can take a couple of seconds to display correctly, however, there is no real stuttering, just a lower-res version until the image refreshes.

Video capture on the N8 keeps up with the current trends, HD ready at 24fps. While still not as smooth as the VGA capture (30fps), the Nokia N8's HD video is among the better ones we’ve seen on a phone. Noise handling is more of a problem than with photos, however, it is still better than most HD video phones out there. There are nice touches as well, like in-body video editing, enabling clips to be trimmed, with text overlaid and photos interspersed within a video, only adding to the N8's strengths as a multimedia capture / sharing device. Outputting content to an HD TV works pretty well, providing smooth video playback leaving us genuinely impressed.

Nokia N8 Sample videos taken in various conditions:




Video playback on the Nokia N8 is immense. With it chewing up everything we threw at it up to a resolution of 720p (DivX, H.264, MP4 and Xvid), and playing it back to us smoothly as can be, we really have no hesitations calling the Nokia N8 a great multimedia phone. Whether watching content on the Nokia N8's screen or outputting to an HD TV, it’s a seamless experience, with no need for codecs here or conversions there, just smooth playback all the way.



The music player has had a very nice revamp. Upon opening up the application, it takes you straight to artists and albums, unlike previous versions which would require an extra step to get here. Clicking the options button lets you view tracks by now playing, song, playlists, genres and podcasts. There is also a link to the Ovi Music store. When viewing albums and artists, holding the Nokia N8 in portrait displays a list, while landscape displays a coverflow like stream of album art. The N8’s coverflow is one of the smoothest we’ve seen and is very usable. The revamp however comes in portrait mode. Once an album or artist is selected, the screen will split, the top half displaying a mini coverflow, while the bottom half has the track list. This is very usable and makes single handed music browsing a doddle.



The on board loud speaker is a letdown. With no stereo output, and a sharp sound, it isn’t there to be used very often. It does a great job of ringing, being loud and audible, however, when listening to music or playing back video, wasn’t a sustainable method of listening to the phone. In contrast, output from the onboard 3.5mm headphone jack was superb for a phone. As is generally the case, connecting a good set of headphones makes all the difference.

Internet and Connectivity:

With 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS on board, the Nokia N8 is, as expected, well connected out of the box to get you online. With an improved mail client, it’s a piece of cake to set up email accounts such as Windows Live, Gmail and Yahoo, and with Mail for Exchange support, inputting just a little more information will give you access to additional mailboxes as well as calendar, contact and task sync.


The on-board Symbian^3 browser is also improved, supporting pinch to zoom and displaying a search bar along with the URL bar. Text wraps to fit the screen well and pages are displayed accurately, however, the browser could be smoother when scrolling and pinching through larger web pages. A pretty decent alternative to the built-in browser is the free Opera Mobile 10.1, which offers a very fast and smooth performance, but unfortunately allows for just a single zoom level (which, in most cases, does the job).



The on-board GPS works well finding the Nokia N8’s position even when indoors. Coupling this with Ovi Maps makes for a very versatile phone that could double up as a GPS replacement provided you had a good data plan. Of course, with Ovi Maps you can also pre-load maps and use voice-guided directions with them off-line. The above average battery life of the N8 also means that using it as a GPS for 30 minutes won’t leave you totally empty.


Additional connectivity includes HDMI output to an HD TV. A microUSB cable to USB provided also turns the Nokia N8 into a USB stick reader, meaning that photos and videos can easily be transferred to and from the phone, and content can even be played from a USB stick directly onto a TV with just an N8 as the middleman.

Software:

The N8 doesn’t have a huge amount of software loaded on it, but what it does have is generally good. Take social networking for example, there is a social networking element from Ovi - Social. This integrates Twitter and Facebook, pulling up feeds into a widget on the home-screen, and linking it through to the installed Facebook / Twitter app. There is also Ovi Maps which as mentioned, does the job well of getting you from A to B. Quickoffice reader is also on the Nokia N8 as is Adobe PDF reader, but for the most part, that’s it. Even the on board YouTube shortcut is just a link to the URL. With the omission of things like games and other non-core software, Nokia may be encouraging N8 users to venture onto the Ovi Store. The lack of random apps also means that the phone isn’t loaded with bloat-ware which is a good thing.

Performance:

With little slowdown anywhere except perhaps when web browsing, the 680MHz ARM 11 processor is doing its job well. In fact, the added graphical acceleration puts the N8 above more powerful competition in areas like video playback. With 16GB of on board memory and expandable memory up to another 32GB, the Nokia N8 is a media lover’s dream.

Voice calling is clear and crisp. When receiving a call on the Nokia N8, volume is very good and audible in busy environments. Clarity is also above average. The recipient of the call from a city center said they had no trouble hearing us, and despite obvious background noise, it was better quality than a number of other handsets tested recently. In more controlled environments that were less quite, call quality yet again proved great, both to us on the N8, and to the recipient.

Battery life on the N8 is also a big improvement over what we expected. With a surprising 1200 mAh battery, the quoted talk time on the Nokia N8 is 12 hours while the standby time is 390 hours. Practically, we found we could get nearly two days of semi intensive use out of the N8 without it grumping at us. There is also a power saving mode which we didn’t use and the phone wasn’t turned off at night.

Conclusion:

The Nokia N8 is another one of those handsets that leaves us conflicted. It’s got some truly amazing elements: the camera, the video playback, the luscious build quality all make us want to forget everything average about it. That said, we can’t. Symbian^3 just doesn’t visually stimulate us enough to make us want to use it, with the homescreens and menus looking dated, Syncing contacts and calendars with anything other than Ovi being unintuitive and an internet experience that could be improved upon. That said, you won’t find a better camera phone on the market, and you certainly won’t find a more versatile video playback phone either. If you’re okay with Symbian^3 and are of the mindframe that hardware is king and multimedia options rule, then we can whole-heartedly recommend the Nokia N8. If however, your eyes are set on an OS that gives you greater versatility in the future, perhaps you might want to look elsewhere. For a larger screen and an Android experience, consider phones like the HTC EVO 4G (upcoming as Desire HD in the EU) and the Samsung Galaxy S (and all of its variants). If, however, you’re looking for something in a slightly smaller form factor, the Motorola DROID 2 (along with the MILESTONE 2 and the HTC Desire) might be a better option. Finally, if a 3.5-inch screen is just perfect for you, and you still want to have a great hardware (but also a great software) experience, then or the Apple iPhone 4 will never leave you wanting.

Nokia N8 Video Review: