Nokia N8 Smartphone: Review
Nokia’s new flagship smartphone is a great (but expensive) camera – but the new Symbian OS isn’t improved enough to faze the competition
What’s the most interesting phone out there? The iPhone 4? The Droid X? Maybe, but there’s another phone hovering in the wings that could have a pivotal role in the future of mobile makers and mobile operating systems.
I’m talking about the Nokia N8, of course. Whether the phone rocks or sucks, it’s going to be significant for the world’s largest phone manufacturer and crucial for the most widely used smartphone operating system – Symbian.
And I’ve had a good play with it.
The end of the affair?
Nokia may be the world’s largest phone maker, but it has gone quiet for the last year. For many years, the company was almost synonymous with mobile phones, but it has fumbled badly in smartphones.
It had a massive head start, and is – still – the largest maker of smartphones. But, in recent years, Apple and Blackberry have been eating the market-share pie, and Google’s Android is expanding very fast.
In the last couple of years, Nokia has come up with exciting devices like the N900 Linux tablet, but has failed to come up with a mainstream phone that anyone would use instead of an iPhone or an Android.
So Nokia has reduced its sales forecasts, and cut back on the number of phones it makes. The N8 is its biggest launch this year, and it’s supposed to turn things around. But it’s coming out of murky waters.
For the last year, Nokia has been going in two directions at once. It’s been pushing Linux and come up with credible and exciting devices like the N900 tablet. Since then, it has merged its Linux project with Intel’s to produce MeeGo – and begun to promote it heavily.
At the same time, it’s been spearheading Symbian, shoring it up financially and helping turn Symbian loose as open source, while backing the production of Symbian^3, the next version of the operating system which is supposed to make this into a proper iPhone-competitor.
Last year, Symbian was the central plank of its bid to make an iPhone competitor, but the N97 flopped. This year, Nokia is trying to fix all that with the production of a new flagship, the N8 – also based on Symbian.
But it turns out that the N8, while the first to have the new Symbian OS, is the last N-series phone to use Symbian. In future, Symbian will be for low-end phones, and the N-series will use MeeGo. The N8 is the end of an era.
