Review Of Nokia N8

Key Features
Full product specification

3.5-inch, 640x360 pixel display
12-megapixel camera with Xenon flash
Symbian^3 operating system
HDMI output
3G, WiFi, GPS connectivity



Nokia N8
With the formidable iPhone 4 spearheading iOS, the imposing Desire HD in Android’s corner, and the capable Samsung Omnia 7 backing the play of Windows Phone 7, you could hardly deny that Nokia has a fight on its hands with the N8. Running Symbian ^3, the latest and supposedly greatest Nokia operating system, running on hardware that’s clearly been well considered and even better put together hardware it has a fighting chance on paper; but then so did Bonaparte at Waterloo and we all know how that battle turned out.

The excellent hardware means that the Nokia N8 leaves a great first impression. The aluminium casing gives the N8 a great feel in the hand and inspires confidence in the N8's likelihood of lasting as long as the contract you'll inevitably be taking along with the handset. The N8's 113.5mm x 59m x 12.9mm dimensions and 135g weight make it light and small enough to be comfortable to carry around day-in, day-out, but also offer enough heft that this phone doesn't feel like a toy - a hard balance to strike.

We particularly like the way the curved edges and angled lower corners mean the phone doesn't dig into the palm of hour hand when being held, a lesson the iPhone 5's designers could do with learning. The N8's buttons have a good feel to them, with a solid feedback, and the presence of a shutter button for the N8's camera is to be lauded. Even the flaps covering the micro-SD and SIM card slots - often a weak spot in mobile phone construction - feel secure.

As these external card slots betray, there's to way to get at the phone's internals. As does the iPhone 4, the Nokia N8 has no removable battery, so you'll be stuck finding professional help should the 1200mAh unit built into your device ever need replacement. However, although we'd prefer the power cell to be user-accessible, we don't think this aspect of the N8 a deal-breaker; especially as it's likely to be a factor in the phone feeling so solidly constructed. Battery life proved excellent in our use of the N8, easily managing a full day of use with power to spare - even when playing music and watching videos.

Although we don’t have any gripes with the build quality of the N8, we do still have some complains about the Nokia's design. First of all, we're not particularly keen on the slider used to toggle the screen in and out of standby. Every now and then when pulling the N8 from a pocket, we found ourselves actuating this toggle unintentionally. More importantly, though, we found ourselves frequently frustrated by the placement of the Home button on the lower left of the N8's front. When using the phone one-handed this was often enough of a stretch for out thumb that we almost lost our grip of the N8 and this would be even more the case for a left-handed user; placing this button in the centre would have been a much better decision, to our minds at least.


We're less inclined to be outright critical of the protruding section on the rear that houses the N8's camera. Some may find the aesthetics and feel of this not to their tastes, but it does have the advantage of providing enough space inside the N8 for its 12-megapixel camera, while also raising the lens away from any surface the N8 is placed upon. A front-facing camera is a surprising inclusion, as we were under the impression that one had to own an iPhone 4 to want to be able to make a video call.

The weakest aspect of the design is the display. At 3.5in diagonally it's big enough to be useable, but its 640 x 360 pixel resolution means that it's far from impressive to look at. Most of the N8's own text is large enough to be perfectly readable, but small fonts on websites, or in applications, look jagged and often verge into being unreadable.

For all that the resolution disappoints, in every other respect the screen is excellent. We never noticed an instance where the capacitive display failed to register a press (even if the software occasionally lagged behind the hardware) and as an AMOLED unit, its colour reproduction is characteristically vivid and saturated. Initially the auto-adjusting backlight occasionally erred too far on the side of battery life for our tastes, but after diving into the settings menu we tweaked this to work flawlessly, too.

Despite its 680MHz CPU having a clock speed that sounds somewhat meagre compared to the 1GHz processors turning up in most contemporary smartphones (even considering the separate Broadcom graphics processor), the Nokia N8 operates swiftly. The key to this is Symbian^3, the latest Nokia operating system, which is (allegedly) much more efficient that the likes of iOS, Windows Phone 7, or Android.

We certainly noticed no problems with speed or responsiveness, and never noticed any problems with the comparatively low 256MB of RAM present inside the N8 even when playing HD videos over its HDMI output. Backing this up with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0, an accelerometer and magnetometer (or orientation sensor and compass, in layman's terms), and 16GB of internal memory as well as 3G connectivity, the N8 could hardly be called under-featured.

Even the speaker in the N8 impresses. We're not suggesting justice will be done to a rendition of Beethoven's 9th, but for watching the occasional YouTube clip, or even the odd downloaded iPlayer programme, while lying in bed we can't see anyone complaining. The bundled headset is praise-worthy, too, offering much less incentive to upgrade than with those you'll find accompanying most other mobile phones.

We heard no complaints about the quality of our speech from any recipients of our phone calls, and have none to make the other way. Considering the Nokia N8 is one of only a few handsets compatible with Orange's HD Voice service, that it offers great call quality is hardly surprising. Having been burned by the iPhone 4's reception issues once too often ourselves, though, it's encouraging to see a smartphone that hasn't forgotten the importance of the latter half of that descriptor.


Then again, the N8 does 'smart' pretty well, too. Take that HDMI-out, for example. You may wonder why on earth you'd ever want to connect a mobile phone to a television, but when you learn that the Nokia N8 can play 720p MKV-wrapped video natively it makes a lot more sense - especially considering you can store a fair few videos on the N8 if you carry a few 32GB SD cards with you to augment the 16GB of internal storage. None of our test videos failed to play, including a Blu-ray rip of Serenity and a couple of episodes of Firefly (again, pulled from a Blu-ray - all paid for, for the record)

On the downside, there's no DivX support out of the box. As such you'll have to re-encode any DivX files you have into a different format, or 'acquire' such videos in another format. Somewhat making up for that is Symbian^3's support for Flash video, and we especially like being able to download videos directly from the iPlayer website to the N8 and play them back on a TV - even if HD videos aren't available in this way. Just make sure you have the mini-HDMI to HDMI converter with you.

Another converter that you might want to keep to hand is the mini-USB to USB cable supplied with the Nokia N8. However, contrary to expectation, this doesn't connect the N8 to a computer (although this is possible), but instead lets you connect a USB storage device to the N8, as long as it doesn't need a lot of power or you have a separate supply handy to provide it.

Audio support also lacks formats such as FLAC and OGG, but for a mobile phone we think WMA, AAC and MP3 (up to 320kbps for all) should prove sufficient. Playback quality with a good paid of earphones is good, as long as you listen to decent quality files, with a slightly more open feel than, say, an iPhone 4 - the difference is definitely one of personal preference rather than objective better or worse, though.

Where the N8, and Symbian^3, does lack is the music player application itself, which isn't exactly a delight to use. It works, but it's clunky and a world away from the iPod built into the iPhone 4 or Zune for Windows Phone 7, both of which are much slicker in use. We were slightly amused by the inclusion of an FM-transmitter in the N8, which lets you broadcast your music to any nearby radio; we really can't see many users using this, though it works perfectly well.

It turns out that, "just not as good as the competition" is a theme for Symbian^3 as a whole. There's a huge deal of functionality built into Nokia's mobile OS, but it's never as usable as we now expect of a high-end smartphone. Take the home screen widgets, for example. It's great that Symbian^3 lets you place information or shortcuts directly on up to three screens, but the widgets are restricted to set sizes, taking up either the entire width of the screen in portrait mode, or two next to each other in landscape. Despite the annoyances of the limited formats these widgets can take, we'd much rather see them or not. Quick access to RSS feeds, weather information, notifications and media controls makes performing common tasks much simpler, and is something we find decidedly lacking from iOS.