Nokia N8 vs Apple iPhone 4

Introduction:

The iPhone took the cell phone industry by surprise in 2007, and managed to usurp half of its profits for only three years in active duty, with only 3% of the world's handsets sold. This was mostly at the financial expense of Nokia, which got knocked down from its perch due to some complacency issues, typical of a sprawling empire. Its share of the cell phone industry profits shrunk threefold, and it was even losing money at some point in the epicenter of the financial crisis.

The Finns are no doubt willing to reclaim some of this space back, so they began some movers and shakers at the management level, bringing a foreigner at the helm for the first time in Nokia's history. The swan song of the previous management is personalized in the Nokia N8, the current flagship of the company, on which a lot of hopes are placed for a turnaround.

The Apple iPhone 4, on the other hand, is the culmination of Apple's efforts to craft an outstanding consumer-friendly device, that will keep people’s attention for a year, before the next iteration is introduced. Apple started a new major design cycle with the iPhone 4, introduced the Retina Display  in it, and custom-made one of the fastest smartphone chipsets on the market, making it the most compelling iPhone package so far. Thus the battle lines are drawn, let's see how the two hotties fare against each other...

Design:

Designwise, it is the steel and glass of the iPhone 4 vs the aluminum of the Nokia N8. One shows the craftsmanship perfected over the years that culminates on a phone made from a single sheet of anodized aluminum, with an etched Nokia logo on the back.


The other has made the thinnest smartphone on the market, out of the most unorthodox materials. The Gorilla Glass casing of the Apple iPhone 4 might have raised questions about its fragility, but coupled with the stainless steel frame around the phone, it also makes for an appearance never before seen in a phone, just what we would expect from the cool kids of the Silicon Valley.

Both phones have 3.5” screens, but the difference in technologies used makes for separate experiences. The iPhone 4's IPS-LCD has been called Retina Display, for its astonishing 640x960 pixels of resolution. It is bright, sharp and clear, and possibly represents the best that the LCD technology can offer for now.

The Nokia N8, on the other hand, has the competing technology in its AMOLED screen, with its high contrast and vivid colors, set back by the 360x640 pixels of resolution, and higher than the iPhone 4 reflectance under bright sunlight, which diminishes visibility. The Nokia N8's display is also protected by the scratch-proof Gorilla Glass, but the touchscreen layer is slightly less responsive than the one on the iPhone 4. On the other hand, Nokia N8's screen has excellent haptic feedback, whereas the iPhone 4 doesn't include that function. The displays offer bright and clear images, with the iPhone 4's higher resolution placing it in the lead.



Both handsets only have one physical home key under the screens. The one on the Nokia N8, though, is tiny and hard to reach when using the phone with one hand, without the risk of dropping the handset. Speaking of dropping, the iPhone 4 now feels more slippery than the previous generations, because of the glass surface.

The handsets weigh roughly the same and have similar dimensions with the notable exception of thickness. The iPhone 4 is surreally thin at 0.37 inch (9.3 mm), while the Nokia N8 clocks in at 0.51 inches (12.9 mm), excluding the elevated area on the back, where the camera is located, necessary to fit the big sensor of the 12MP shooter, and the Xenon flash. The glass back of the iPhone is smooth, with only the logo, and a small round area for the lens' eye plus the tiny dot of the LED flash in the upper left corner.



There are no less than ten elements, like openings and buttons, around the sides of the Nokia N8, which comes to show the different design approaches in the creation of the handsets.. Both phones sport non-removable batteries, thus their SIM card slots are placed on the sides, but accessing it in the Nokia N8 means just prying open the plastic cover, while the micro SIM tray on the right of the iPhone 4 needs a paper clip to come out.



It is immediately apparent that a lot of thought and sleepless nights have gone into the design and manufacturing of the iPhone 4 and the Nokia N8 from multiple teams. The two phones represent some of the best pieces of industrial design in the smartphone universe, each with its own character – the strong but smooth aluminum unibody of the Nokia N8 comes in a bunch of different colors, and the steel and glass construction of the iPhone 4 resembles a concept phone, made by a boutique designer shop in limited series.

Interface and Software:

There is no point in pitting the two mobile operating systems directly against one another, it would be comparing apples to oranges, no pun intended. Nokia has improved on the user experience in Symbian^3 and it now offers multiple home screens with the all-important widgets on them. It has also disposed of most annoyances like double-tap to select. Symbian^3 is a functional mobile OS having true multitasking abilities with card view, and is very familiar to millions of people using Nokia phones – legacy is important, if you have been in the business for so many years. It is also a bit cumbersome, more suitable to power users, and newcomers need to familiarize themselves with it first, before they begin to use the full functionalities of the platform.

The interface of the iPhone 4, on the other hand, has to be examined as only an element of the holy trinity device - mobile OS - applications, which Apple has tightly integrated and isolated from outside influences as much as it could, providing users with the outstanding feeling that things just work, and look cool in the process. The powerful A4 chipset runs the simple, self-explicable screens, full of colorful app shortcuts incredibly smooth, with pretty animations and transparency effects that are favorites of young and old. It is immediately apparent that this is an interface designed from the ground up for touchscreens, and iOS is suitable for anybody, despite some shortcomings like the lack of full multitasking and Bluetooth file transfer.



With that out of the way, we have to mention that the Symbian^3 homescreens look more complicated than the interface of iOS simply because they, similarly to Android, offer some additional functionality through widgets. The iPhone 4’s paradigm is simplicity – a sandboxed app for each task, linked to a colorful icon on the screen, even for basic functions, like the dialer. Nokia N8 supports smart dialing, while iOS4 is still lagging in that respect. If you need to do some Facebooking on the iPhone 4, you go to the Facebook app. Nokia N8, on the other hand, now offers social networking integration (Facebook and Twitter) in your phonebook feature. It is more cumbersome to set up than in some of the best Android UI overlays out there, like HTC Sense, or TouchWiz 3.0, but it's there. Threaded messaging has also finally come to Symbian, but messaging on the iPhone 4 is still a smoother experience.

In short, Nokia N8 feels much more as a phone, while the iPhone 4 feels like a designer box for app execution, that is why it irreparably disrupted the cell phone industry three years ago. For example, Nokia has had video calling first in the 6680, launched in 2005, but most people are just now beginning to use it, thanks to the simple and reliable execution, and the marketing behind Apple iPhone 4's FaceTime, even though it only works via Wi-Fi for now.

The widgetized home screens of the Nokia N8, offer more than simply shortcuts to separate functions – similarly to a modern Android handset. They are a way to get what you need (apps, favorite contacts, status updates, email, RSS feeds) straight from the home screen, without even having to open an app most of the time.

Once you set it up properly, this approach becomes very useful in everyday life, but Nokia has a long way to go in polishing things if it wants the interface to look as slick, smooth and likeable, as the ones in iOS or Android, the current major contestants in the mobile OS department. Perhaps it will never even happen for Symbian.

What we would also like to see improved is the text input department of Nokia's handset. Apple pioneered the finger-friendly virtual keyboards with the iPhone. Nokia N8’s virtual keyboard in landscape mode (portrait one only offers triple-tap and T9, circa 2002), is decent to type on, but trying to input anything anywhere raises a text box that covers the whole screen, even for simple tasks like filling in a website in the browser's address bar. We'd rather see it as an overlay above the UI, not separate screen, blocking the entire view. Nokia already loaded Swype for Symbian^3 on Ovi Store, however portrait mode will be coming later, and you will have to suffer in the meantime.




On the other hand, Nokia N8 offers free lifetime navigation with the excellent Ovi Maps, which has turn-by-turn directions coverage in much more countries than the free Google Maps for now. It is an offline navigational software with all bells and whistles, including Lonely Planet and Trip Advisor overlays, of the iGO, Navigon or TomTom type, that you have to pay some serious cash for in the App Store.



Speaking of the App Store, software is where the iPhone 4 easily overshadows every phone out there, not only the Nokia N8. The Espoo flagship comes with a number of preinstalled apps and games, but the sheer size of the 300 000+ applications available for the iPhone, makes it look like a drop in the bucket. That wealth of apps is a goldmine for Apple, and has resulted in users integrating the iPhone 4 in every part of their lives – from mobile payments to gym schedules - an experience that is extremely hard, if not impossible, to replicate in the near future. In contrast, Nokia is just now putting an emphasis on apps and developers for its Ovi Store.

Browser and Connectivity:

The browser on the Nokia N8 is definitely a weak point, compared to Safari in the iPhone 4. While it has pinch-to-zoom, the scrolling is often choppy, especially if the page contains Flash, and the interface is a chore to use. Filling in the above mentioned web address takes much more stages than the needed one. A firmware update is expected to bring Swype and a new WebKit browser, but out of the box typing and browsing has stayed in the Symbian^1 era. The Safari browser on the iPhone 4, in contrast, is smooth as silk, quite fast and a pleasure to use, with the lack of Flash being the only nuisance.



Both handsets also offer a complete set of connectivity options, and the Nokia N8 is supporting the newest Bluetooth 3.0 standard. The Nokia N8 is pentaband, i.e. 3G speeds can be accessed on most GSM carriers worldwide, including T-Mobile and AT&T in the US. Symbian^3 supports USB-on-the-go for connecting a memory stick directly to the Nokia N8, and copy or play files from it, whereas iOS4 still doesn't support USB mass storage mode. The Finnish handset also has an FM transmitter, which can beam music from your phone to your home or car stereo, which is a nice option to have, but often runs into interference problems in big cities with many radio stations.

Camera:

The camera interface of the Nokia N8 is not very touch-friendly - icons and sliders are tiny and not easy to pinpoint correctly at times. Older Symbian habits rear their ugly heads here, such as two taps to select some settings. This is also expected to be fixed in the firmware update, but it doesn't really do the 12MP shooter with Xenon flash justice. The interface for the 5MP camera with LED flash on the iPhone 4, in contrast, is very simple, touch-optimized and easy to use. No numerous settings, just a flash setting, HDR switch, and  a video mode toggle .


The Nokia N8 offers photographic choices aplenty, including white balance, exposure, ISO, focus modes, and various scenes and effects. Its 12MP camera with powerful Xenon flash is aimed more to shutterbugs, who know what they are doing, so it adds abilities to tinker with settings like sharpness and contrast, or shoot in a vivid mode, which produces the bright, saturated photos and videos that so many people prefer. The iPhone 4 produces saturated photos by default.

The shots produced by the iPhone 4 camera are considered one of the best coming out of a smartphone. There are phones with more megapixels, but pixel count means very little for quality, and the 5MP snapper in Apple's handset beats most other phones with its bright, saturated photos, offering plenty of sharpness and detail, that are immediately pleasing to the eye. If we add to that the camera's ease of use, and the simplicity of taking HDR shots that produce even better results, most users will be satisfied with what the iPhone 4 offers in terms of casual photographic capabilities.

Nokia N8 takes higher resolution photos, but doesn't capture that much more detail for a 12MP shooter. It produces more natural, even murky and plain looking colors by default, allowing for numerous adjustments and scene modes, and the resulting material is a rich playground for post-processing. Nokia N8 offers several metering modes, whereas in the iPhone 4, the exposure is set depending on the object you focus on. In vivid mode, the Nokia N8 produces high-contrast, oversaturated photos, which are usually more likable, and are similar to what the iPhone 4 is producing by default.





The indoor photos from the iPhone 4 when there is some light, turn out fine, thanks to the back-illuminated sensor, which helps lower the ISO, and noise levels are kept in check. The image in fluorescent lighting (for example in the kids bookstore) came out very good, whereas the ones under incandescent lighting from our traditional indoor samples setup had a yellow overcast to them. That seems to be a white balance calculation mishap, and might be resolved in a software update to compensate better for the light bulb illumination. The Nokia N8, on the other hand, performed admirably in low-light situations, thanks to the powerful Xenon flash, which we found to lend a helping hand with illumination up to a ten feet distance without ambient light, whereas the iPhone 4's LED flash was notably less useful. The night shots around town again came out brighter and slightly overexposed on the iPhone 4, with blown-up highlights (the Happy bar neon sign, the cathedral lighting). In macro mode both smartphones performed admirably, correctly focusing only on the nearby object, blurring the rest of the frame.





When recording 720p HD video, which both handsets are capable of, Nokia N8 records in stereo, thanks to the dual-microphone system, but in 25fps, while the iPhone 4 does 30fps and uses its LED light for filming situations in the dark. The Nokia N8 offers a very usable 2x digital zoom while shooting video.

Video capture from the iPhone 4 comes out slightly smoother than the one on the Nokia N8, especially when you pan around, due to the higher frame ratio. The brightness is higher and colors stand out more on the iPhone 4 video samples, which is a good thing on a cloudy day, but consequently sources of light in the night clips come out a bit overblown (headlights on all cars looking like cheap halogens, street lamps halo, etc.).

The Nokia N8 videos, on the other hand, look slightly undersaturated, and vivid mode has to be turned on to easily remedy this, or a bit of tinkering around with the settings would do as well. The camera on the Nokia N8 has a wilder field of view, allowing it to capture more of the scenery around. All in all, for smartphones, both handsets performed admirably in the camera department (with the exception of flash illumination, where Xenon works much better), and it will depend on ease of use vs functionality preferences, if camera was your main choice criteria.

Apple iPhone 4 Sample Video 1




Nokia N8 Sample Video 1




Apple iPhone 4 Sample Video 2




Nokia N8 Sample Video 2




Apple iPhone 4 Sample Video 3




Nokia N8 Sample Video 3




Apple iPhone 4 Sample Video 4




Nokia N8 Sample Video 4




Apple iPhone 4 Sample Video 5




Nokia N8 Sample Video 5




Apple iPhone 4 Sample Video 6




Nokia N8 Sample Video 6



Multimedia:

The multimedia gallery looks better on the iPhone 4, whereas on the Nokia N8 the grid of thumbnails doesn't even offer discernible borders to distinguish the separate files, it just looks like a quilt. From the iPhone 4,  videos can be uploaded to YouTube straight from the gallery, while on the Nokia N8 uploading to popular services directly from there is not supported. Nokia N8 has the photo and video editing functionalities built in, while the iPhone offers the iMovie app for $4.99, as well as a plethora of other photography-oriented programs.

Being the name resurrected from the ashes by the ubiquitous iPod, Apple has done a great job with the sound quality on the iPhone 4, at least in headset mode. Nokia N8's music player, on the other hand, just now supports such Cover Flow-like eye candy. However, its true virtue is the work of the Dolby Mobile technologies in both headset mode, and through the speaker. It can play sound encoded with Dolby Digital Plus, which adds to the immersive experience, especially if viewing a properly encoded HD movie on a big screen with 5.1 channel surround sound via Nokia N8's HDMI-out socket.




Speaking of video playback, Nokia N8 plays anything thrown at it, including DivX/Xvid, and the .mkv Matroska container. Those have to be converted to work on the iPhone 4, and everything has to go through iTunes and the proprietary connector, which is annoying. Both chipsets are powerful enough to play HD resolutions without notable issues. If you have a 4”, or a 4.3” display, you would sniff at watching video on a 3.5” one, but it's still a decent size for that nonetheless.

Performance:

The in-call performance on the Nokia N8 is very good, with loud and clear sounding voices in the earpiece, while the noise-cancelling microphones do their thing for better output at the hearing end.
The iPhone 4 also has a noise cancelling mic, and the voice quality for the receiving end is very good, even in loud environments. Fine clarity in the earpiece on our side was the norm, despite some static noise in the background sometimes.

The speaker of the Nokia N8 has the upper hand here, producing loud sounds with minimum distortion, while the one on the iPhone 4 is weaker, with notable tinny sounds, as can be expected from the slimmest smartphone on the market.

Nokia N8, despite its metal casing, has placed the antennas near the plastic at both ends of the phone, so receptionwise it doesn't disappoint. As far as the iPhone 4 goes – we all remember the Antennagate it was sucked in after launch, but (we personally didn't experience it ourselves, maybe because we were in a strong signal area?). Battery life in 3G mode is rated at 7 hours of talk time for the iPhone 4, and 5.5 hours for the Nokia N8.

Conclusion:

The Nokia N8 has a lot going for it. It is a multimedia powerhouse, packing a 12MP camera with a huge sensor, Carl-Zeiss lens, and a powerful Xenon flash. The Finnish handset also adds other notable virtues, that the iPhone 4 doesn't have, namely the ability to play almost any HD video file on a big screen via HDMI-out, with 5.1 channel surround sound. It also offers USB-on-the-go, an FM transmitter, removable storage, and free lifetime navigation that works offline in most countries. This feature set will be enough for many, especially Nokia fans and photographers, to pick it over the iPhone 4.

The Apple iPhone 4, on the other hand, also has a great camera, and the interface, like everything else on the phone, is very easy to learn and a pleasure to use right off the bat, compared to the functional, but more convoluted ways of Symbian^3. In the end, we have to say that it is not possible to leave out the App Store when comparing the iPhone 4 to another handset, just because it exists. It is rather hard to part with the comfort of your iPhone applications once you are sucked into that ecosystem, and Nokia cannot yet replicate that in the hotch-potch Ovi Store.

If we leave the App Store out (and we shouldn't), we have to admit that Nokia has created a real multimedia Swiss Army Knife with the N8, by including some functions that the iPhone 4 doesn't have (FM transmitter, USB-on-the-go, HDMI-out). However, as the financial results of Nokia and Apple show, fighting with hardware means you have already lost the battle.

Nokia N8 has very compelling extra features, but with the the Retina Display and the fast A4 chipset, the iPhone 4 already has some of the best hardware out there. On top of that, it is all crammed in the thinnest smartphone on the market, made of designer-grade materials. It also allows you to run some of the slickest programs ever made for a phone. And it is exactly the software, i.e. the overall people-friendly experience that matters most, and that's where Nokia has to play catch up now.

Nokia N8 vs Apple iPhone 4 Video Comparison: