Nokia N8 Smartphone: Review

If you’ve used the iPhone or Android, and expect to be able to flick icons around the screen with ease, you will be disappointed with the N8 – unless there’s a big and unexpected change to the UI before the full launch.

The web browser is there, and as a major plus, it supports Flash – and has been the only mobile browser to do so. The iPhone never will unless Steve Jobs has a Damascene conversion, and the Android Flash browser is coming in the 2.2 Froyo release.

However the browser in the phone I saw was jerky and slow. This could be due to other factors in the Internet connection, but the same pages filled and scrolled more quickly and smoothly on Androids and iPhones over the same Internet link. And it’s very fiddly to get up a field to put in a new address, or navigate to previous pages or bookmarks – again the competition is better.

Holding the menu button down is the Symbian equivalent of Ctrl-Alt-Del. It shows you the running applications, and lets you move between them.

Basic settings can be adjusted fairly easily – it hooked onto our office Wi-Fi easily, and jobs like changing the ring tone were not taxing.

Great media work

However much I didn’t warm to the rest of the device, I have to like a phone with an HDMI socket and a 12Mpixel camera.

Yes, 12 megapixels. I won’t bore you with my shots, sample photos have been on the web for a couple of months now (left), and it’s worth looking at them to see the level of detail and lack of distortion. It certainly beats the 5 Mpixels of the iPhone 4

Also, while other phones haver on putting any sort of flash in, Nokia has added a Xenon flash, which gives better colours than the usual LED flashes.

In video, Nokia offers 720p resolutions, which matches what Apple is offering in the iPhone 4 – though it looks to us as if the better optics in the Nokia get better results in video than you get from the iPhone 4.

And an HDMI output (left) is a great idea. This connects easily with displays and produces good images – I specially like the idea of teaming this up with a pocket projector like the 3M MPro 150 I recently reviewed for go-anywhere big-screen movies.

The music player is also pretty good. Apple is still the benchmark here, but the N8’s player does a more than adequate job, scrolling smothly through tracks and allowing the right searches.

Conclusions

Tragically, even though the N8 has the best camera I have ever seen in any phone, it looks like it will be let down by a Symbian OS which still looks too clumsy for a luxury phone. It’s sure to have some rough parts smoothed off before the final launch, but what we saw would not win over anyone who didn’t already like the OS.

It’s going to have a reasonable price (apparently SIM-free £350 on Vodafone), so for someone who wants a Nokia with a great camera, this is exactly what you have been looking for. You can buy a standalone 12Mpixel camera for about half that, however, so I think that set of people will be too small for this phone to be real winner.

Nokia is probably already aware of this – hence the decision to move over to MeeGo.