What Does Nokia N8 Have?

A First Look

By Javed Anwer

Finally, it has arrived. Nokia on Tuesday launched N8 in India with great hopes.

The company has lost significant amount of market share and mindshare to Android and iPhone in the last two years. Of course, falling fortunes of Nokia is a separate story. For now, it’s all about N8. The phone was announced in April and since then it has been a much-awaited device, at least among Nokia fans. At last, it’s shipping and in a few days we will come to know how well it compares with the best that Android offers.

A full review is a few days away — we just got the review piece and are putting it through its paces — but a quick first look is not going to harm anyone. N8, from the looks of it, is a finely crafted phone. Unlike several high-end smartphones wrapped in glossy plastic, N8 has an industrial design with a body made of aluminum and plastic. It feels solid in hand and, unlike Nokia N900, is slim and weighs around 135g.

As far as specs are concerned, N8 is powered by a 680Mhz ARM and 256MB RAM. This is somewhat disappointing as competitors nowadays put a 1GHz ARM processor and more than 500MB RAM in their devices. Rest is usual affair. Internal space of 16GB (additional 32GB can be added through microSD) is in line with expectations and a camera, which boasts 12 mega-pixel tag, is best in the industry, at least on the paper. The device sports a 3.5 inches AMOLED screen with a tad low resolution of 640 x 360, HDMI port, a front-facing camera, Xenon flash, 1200mAH battery.

First impression

Given the fact that Nokia can’t stop talking about N8’s 12 mega pixel camera, the first thing we did after taking it out of the box was to shoot a few pictures and videos, which are captured in 720p. Usually we find that tall claims, when it comes to gadgets, often fall flat. For a change, with N8 it’s different. The phone may not kill your point-and-shoot digital cameras, but when it comes to pictures and videos the quality is good. The pictures are sharp and detailed, Xenon flash is powerful and videos good.

Screen too, for a change, is good. Unlike the resistive touchscreens on previous Nokia phones, N8 screen is capacitive. That means it responds faster and colours are vibrant. Though there are a few minor glitches with N8 screen, we need to explore it in detail before we can be sure of them.

All this doesn’t mean that N8 is without flaws. Symbian^3 — better than Symbian 60 found on N97 — still doesn’t look like it can challenge Android or even Samsung’s Bada. Performance is a mixed bag. The device generally feels quite fast but then there are several tasks where it simply takes extra bit of seconds to respond. Web browsing too, from our limited experience so far, is a big problem on N8 and integration with social networking continues to be poor.

N8 is one of the make or break devices for the Nokia and the company believes that in this phone it has a compelling product to take on the Android & its bevy of smartphones. For the next few days we hope to put the claim to test and see how much value N8 holds for you, the users. For full review, watch this space.