Nokia N8 Smartphone: Review

There’s another departure – the battery is permanently installed. To be fair, it is possible to get out, but it takes a special screwdriver to remove two screws near the bottom end of the device. Clearly, Nokia wants to say – like Apple – that battery replacement isn’t an issue.

With no back cover to pop off, the only place to put the SIM card and the micro-SD card is on the side, under two rather awkward flaps (left). It takes standard SIM cards – of course – unlike Apple’s micro-SIMs. And the micro-SD slot takes cards with up to 48Gbyte capacity – which is going to be useful when the pictures you take on it will be a couple of Mbytes each (see below).

There’s a micro-USB connector which Nokia cleverly allows to act as a host (so it can read Flash drives).

Elsewhere round the side of the phone there’s a sliding button to lock the screen, a camera button, volume / zoom controls, an HDMI-video output under a flap at the end of the phone, and a button under the screen to handle menu operations. And there’s also a socket for the power adapter. About which I will now grumble.

Nokia’s non-standard charger

[Update: Apparently this section is controversial. What I originally wrote follows, with additions in italics. l’m reporting my results here, and interested in any other information people have – Peter Judge]

When it comes to charging the phone I’m very surprised to see Nokia making a decision I can only describe as arrogant. The United Nations ITU-T has designed a “universal charger” using a micro-USB connector. Nokia has even signed up to the idea. Henceforth all phones should charge using micro-USB, and that should see the end of the tonnes of power-adapters produced and thrown away every year.

Apple’s iPhone doesn’t use the universal charger, of course, because Apple has invested way too much in its proprietary iPod/iPad/iPhone connector, and in any case at the other end of the iPhone cable, there’s usually a USB connector, so it’s universal at the other end.

But look what Nokia’s done on the N8. Just like every other phone maker (except Apple), it’s put in a standard micro-USB adapter for data. It’s on the side of the phone. But while other phones, including Blackberries and HTC Desires, use the micro-USB for power as well as data, Nokia doesn’t.

The N8 has the tired old 2mm Nokia adapter socket on the bottom. On the plus side, this does mean you can use previous Nokia adapters to charge it. On the minus side, the Nokia jack is fiddly and vulnerable to getting bent, and generally it’s not even as good as micro-USB!

I feel petty going on at this length, but Nokia’s refusal to adopt the universal charger – after it signed up to it – could just be symbolic of the way it tends to ignore the rest of the world.

[[As you can see from the comments below, other people doubt my results here. I have been made aware that I’m reporting something that appears to vary from the published Nokia specification, but I assure you, when I plugged a working micro-USB charger into the N8, there was no indication it wsa charging. It is possible that the production N8 models will charge that way. I can only say that the phone I had definitely did not indicate it was charging over USB.

The Nokia E81 which has been my main phone for the last year certainly doesn’t charge over USB, and as you can tell, I’ve not been enjoying the 2mm jack it does charge with. At first sight it looks as if the N8 is following the same pattern, but some of the helpful comments have pointed out, the N8 also includes the ability to act as a USB host, which could explain why it still needs a separate charging socket (to charge the phone while loading data from a USB device).  I think there is more to find out here, but whatever we do find out, I’m still disappointed to see a non-standard charger hanging on here, even if there’s a reasonable product decision behind it instead of “arrogance” – Peter Judge]]

This

If Nokia does support USB charging, I initially did don’t understand why it has built in a separate power connector and supplied a non-standard power adapter as well – Peter Judge ]

Symbian is still clunky

My first reaction to the phone OS is disappointment. I don’t know how much of a change I expected in the Symbian operating system, but there’s not much altered. To be honest, it’s unreasonable to expect anything major, as it would be very hard to utterly change the user interface at the same time as solidifying the OS enough to turn it loose as open source.

What greets you on the N8’s home screen is very very like what I saw on the N97’s home screen – an interface that a colleague described as “a set of fridge magnets”.

Symbian^3 is supposed to be more of a social networking creature, with multitasking widgets busy in the background. Maybe, but we found it fiddly to add apps and change widgets around, and the OS’ insistence on pushing Ovi at us made us feel Nokia was trying to push us into a walled garden with fewer flowers than Apple’s App Store.