The Nokia N8 is one of the most solid feeling phone symbian that we saw. Its main body is housed in an aluminum block carved that exudes quality and craftsmanship. The rounded edges on the side of the Nokia N8 make it easy to grasp and hold, and volume controls and locking mechanism are positioned so that they can be easily activated when holding the phone in your left hand.
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A 12-megapixel camera with xenon flash takes pride of place on the back of the Nokia N8. As expected, the picture quality on the highest setting is nothing short of amazing. The xenon flash is beautifully in dark, illuminating dark pub beer gardens in the evening with aplomb. You can change the image resolution to smaller sizes (like 3-megapixels) if you're just taking snaps for Facebook pleasure and there is a macro shot mode allowing you to take super detailed close-ups.
Not only the camera of the Nokia N8 came with some serious firepower megapixels, it also comes with a wide range of settings and features. You get standard effects such as sepia and black and white mode and there is a "vivid" color, which saturates the bright colors in an area, creating a dynamic high-end style. There is a wide range of photo editing tools to choose from including the crop really useful, rotate and resize tools and fun effects like Posterise, solarization and screening.
The Nokia N8 3.5 inch OLED touch is light and easily reacts to the touch. You can easily pinch to zoom in on photos and web pages and scroll through three screens home or with a finger swipe or using the three button at the bottom of the screen that allows you to jump through each home screen easily.
Widgets and shortcuts to applications and phone functions can be loaded on the Nokia N8 three home screens. We really appreciate the level of customization that was given to users here. Little things like being able to change the background image to create your own network of shortcuts is half the fun of having a smartphone - you get to design an interface that best suits what you want the phone to.
Kudos must be given to Nokia not to let the musical side of things on the N8. The audio quality is really good. It is easy to move music to N8 from your PC and creating playlists is a breeze. The earphones come with a remote control and are the type of the inner ear with interchangeable tips for freezing. This ensures comfort and also helps reduce leakage. There are a number of presets for the sound on the N8 as Jazz, Bass Boost, Classical, etc. You can further enhance your listening experience with stereo widening and sound effects added punch. Combine all this with the 16GB of onboard memory and microSD slot and you have yourself a pretty decent music free agent.
Thank you to the camera face, you can easily make video calls. In all honesty, we are not looking at all that on video calls Recombu here but for those of you who want to do it should be noted that the Nokia N8 supports video calls over 3G and Wi-Fi - a 4 thing that the iPhone does not work.
Last but not least please bear with us as we lyricism of HDMI-out capabilities of the Nokia N8. Much has been done that you can watch your high definition videos and photos on a TV HD Ready. While you can indeed do this on the Nokia N8 which is more impressive is the fact that you can play games - including birds and angry Lite Need For Speed Shift - on a large screen. These high-end well and it's a real joy playing mobile games on the big screen. We spent a good part of our lunch hour to get three stars on each of the six levels on the demo Angry Birds.
Battery life is also something interesting about crying, we had a good day to take pictures, play games on TV and calls on the Nokia N8 and used only about half of the battery . On other smartphones with large touch screen and a battery-hungry CPUs we're used to having to keep an eye on the counter every time we do something.
Our main beef with the Nokia N8 unique is that it's not easy to learn. The first few minutes of using the N8 as if we were trying to solve a Rubik cube, and everything we tried to do was create a shortcut to the camera. You often feel that Nokia has opted for three left turns when one would have done right. Unfortunately, you get the feeling a lot when you use the N8.
When you type a text message and click the green check mark to do so, there is no immediate option to send the message. When you have just taken a picture or video taken there is no immediate shortcut to the gallery to look at all your other photos and video. The Nokia N8 is not unusable by any means, but we think the user the first time would be difficult here. It's not a good start first for Symbian ^ 3 as a smartphone platform in the world beat.
We really liked the music player overall, but it came with a couple of snags, one minor and one major. Then you get a choice of equalizer presets in there is no possibility to modify or create your own. You can do this on a Nokia N96 as far as it is not surprising to see this feature here.
In addition, more unforgivable, we noticed that the volume and stereo effects are temporarily disabled when you pause a track. So you could be listening to blissed Akercocke, tool or Garth Brooks in glorious stereo surround floaty, hit pause and you get about a second punishment "of music in stereo not inglorious.
It's like being standing outside a room with music playing loudly in and suddenly someone opened the door a fraction, your ears become listening to a particular sound, and then for a split second the sound changes dramatically. We hope that this little particular problem resolved in a firmware update to the future because it ruins the serious music listening experience.
We were not impressed with the default web browser. It supports pinch to zoom in but it did not resize the text or images or even particularly fast. We found that when you zoomed in on a page of text heavy, sometimes grouped hyperlinks appear next to the uncoupled normal text, which makes it difficult to read. Opera Mobile is also included, but it does not work much better and does not support pinch to zoom. Using either browser, we found the page load time to be slow, even on Wi-Fi, so we could not recommend the Nokia N8, if you wanted a phone to surf the Web.
Conclusion
The Nokia N8 is a powerful smartphone with some serious features like 12 megapixel camera and HDMI output capabilities. However we feel that there is still much progress on the UI side of things and the web browser can do with a serious overhaul. If the navigation of a multitude of menus is not a puzzle for you, so there is much to like about the Nokia N8.