Nokia N8 Review: Nokia's New Flagship
by Mithun Chandrasekhar on January 12, 2011 1:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Nokia
- N8
- Symbian
- Mobile
The N8’s 12MP centerpiece
As I had briefly mentioned earlier, the Nokia N8 has what is probably the best camera to make home in a mobile phone. And Nokia is making no bones in letting people know about this. While Apple may talk about letting in more photons with a backside illuminated sensor, Nokia has actually gone ahead and done something about it—both with the optics and sensor size. At the heart of the N8’s camera is a 1/1.83” sensor which is in fact larger than most point and shoot cameras (which often carry sensors ranging from 1/2.3 – 1/2.5” in size) that are currently available. While a large sensor can’t do much by itself, Carl Zeiss has provided a decent 28mm equivalent lens that makes good of the sensor, given the tight confines and dimensional restrictions of a mobile phone. In fact, much of the N8’s physical profile is dictated by that optical system.
Just to drive home the point as to how serious it is about the N8 as an imaging device, Nokia has equipped the phone with a real xenon flash (and an AF-assist lamp in the same housing) along with an active neutral density filter that automatically slides in place if you were to try and take pictures with a lot of bright light in it. This combined with features such as face detection and video stabilization (not image) make the N8 a reasonably good replacement to most entry-level point and shoot cameras currently available. The N8 could pull off pretty good shots without much issue in all but the poorest of lighting conditions. In poorly-lit scenarios, the N8 succumbs to its camera phone roots and produces visibly noisy pictures that lack detail. Pulling down the ISO manually and using a tripod would help, but this IS a phone after all.
I haven’t been able to pull up a guide number for the xenon flash, but suffice to say that it is an order of magnitude better than the LED/dual-LED flash found in most phones. Also, since the N8 lacks a motorized lens, it has a digital-only zoom which Nokia has consciously restricted to 2x for still photos and 3x for videos for the sake of maintaining image quality. The average size of a 4000x3000 pixel (12MP) image taken by the N8 is about 2.4MB which means it is compressed a fair bit. When set to “Close Up” mode the N8 can focus on objects as close as 3”.
Shots with the N8’s brilliant 12MP camera. The gallery has more camera shots.
Speaking of video, the N8 can record 720p video at 25fps with stereo sound. The N8 has 2 mics; one next to the camera module and another on the front of the phone. In test, the N8 could capture pretty decent audio even in moderately noisy and windy environments. It looks like the positioning of the mics and the noise cancellation algorithms together are doing a decent job of cutting out the background noise. In use, the N8 captured 720p video at an average bit rate of about 10 Mbps in the H.264/AVC format. The N8 makes use of something called an active hyperfocal system to maintain focus between about 60cm to infinity, without having to use a continuous focusing system. To describe this in a little more detail without diving too deep, the hyperfocal length of a lens is a measure of some distance at which, if the lens is focused, everything from a particular point (60cm in case of the N8) to infinity will be in complete focus. In the N8, the camera and software adjust the position of the lens if needed, to maintain this hyperfocal length and hence the “active” moniker. Because of this, the N8 can make do without hefty auto-focusing motors and deliver good focusing performance.
Bench Video
Demo Video
The camera interface itself is pretty straightforward and easy to use. You can easily change the captured image resolution, white balance, color tone, flash, scene mode and ISO options. There are quite a few still photo and video editing options available on the phone and the N8 seems to do a reasonably quick job of post processing. The one thing that I found quite annoying, was having to make all edits in one go on the N8. You cannot “save” a project as such; you have to make all your edits at once and save the file.
In-phone editing options on the N8
The N8 does not support panorama shots out of the box and I found this a bit surprising. Only when I casually dug through the Ovi Store did I find the “Panorama” app by Nokia.
Why this isn’t included from the get go or even pointed to by a link somewhere beats me. Either way, the panorama app does its job without any issues, although I must say I had to read the help section to try and understand how to get it working; not the most straightforward implementation for taking panorama shots. As with most camera phones now-a-days, the N8 also supports geo-tagging photos and videos. At the end of it, the one thing that’s blatantly clear is that the camera on the N8 is not a checkbox feature. It really is a well-engineered piece of hardware that Nokia seems to have integrated very well with the N8, instead of just tacking it on as an after-thought.
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sumeetm90 - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
I have been using N8 for a month now and have discovered following pesky issues:1) You cant mark multiple messages in your inbox. If you want to delete say 10 messages in a go you need to individually delete them. (Dont understand how can nokia make such a blunder)
2) Cannot utilize full screen to view pdf documents in Adobe reader provided by nokia. This is really ridiculous. You are forced to use 75% of the available screen to read pdfs.
3) I was surprised to find that there was no stopwatch feature included with the new phone. Yes you can download an app but when I pay Indian rupees 23600 (approx $500) for a smartphone, I expect nokia to put a stopwatch/countdown timer in phone.
4) You need to download a scientific calculator. The default calculator is pretty lame and embarrassing. If you search the ovi store you will realise it is not so easy to download a scientific calculator.
I gotta agree with Mithun about the issues with browser, mail application and ovi store. I have been a vivid Nokia fan and thats why I bought N8. But clearly nokia has lot of issuses to address. I cant recommend this phone to my friends. Lets hope nokia is listening and comes up with a descent update soon.
Johnmcl7 - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
Nokia have a licensing agreement to stick the Zeiss name on their phones, that's all there is to it as the lenses most certainly are not a Zeiss design by any stretch of the imagination despite the laughable 'Tessar' branding on some of them.Voldenuit - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
That doesn't mean that Zeiss does not have a say on which lenses their branding goes on and provide input on lens designs etc.This is very similar to the arrangement Panasonic have with Leica - Panasonic design and manufacture the lenses themselves, but Leica has the final say on whether or not the lens is good enough to receive their branding. In fact, while my Leica R4 had genuine Leica lenses, the body itself was a copy of a Minolta SLR, so Leica branding has been a 2-way street.
Similarly, the Sony Alpha Zeiss and compact camera lenses are designed and built by Sony. And my Pentax SMC Takumar (ca. 1970) was manufactured by Asahi Optical Company. This is not news, it's been the modus operandi of the camera/lens industry for decades, and very similar to the ODM/OEM relationship in electronics.
afwjam - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
Actually Carl Zeiss designs the entire camera module. There is an interesting youtube video with one of their engineers explaining the resolving capabilities of the lens. Apparently its far superior to most SLR kit lenses.afwjam - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtIFBMbiaPoLavkesh - Monday, January 17, 2011 - link
The new firmware is coming in Feb with improved browser, portrait qwerty keyboard with split screens. You can see the Beta version of the firmware running on Nokia N8 herehttp://how2i.com/743/nokia-n8-symbian3-caught-runn...
fneuf - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 - link
Hello Mithun,I'm a little surprised by the anemic result of the Nokia N8 WiFi performance.
Both Droid X and N8 use the same chip, the TI WL1271A (from Texas Instruments) that handles WLAN, Bluetooth and FM connectivities.
Considering the Droid X result is 4 times higher than the N8 one despite being built on the same hardware I really wonder where does lay the N8 fault. Anyone have an idea ?
bitflung - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
i just looked up nokia+gpu and hit this article:http://www.nokiaviews.com/2010/01/nokias-gpu-story...
they claim that all of the following had dedicated GPUs:
Nokia N93, N95, N82 and E90 - all having their 'golden days' back in 2007
i know for sure my old N95 had a GPU - that was back in 2007. i recall running some 3D accelerated apps that performed very well:
http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_n95-1716.php
in fact, it uses a similar core as the iphone still uses today:
http://www.symbian-freak.com/reviews/n95/n95_revie...
that article states that the n95 of 2007 used the powervr MBX core (also used in original iphone), while the iphone 4 (and ipad, ipod touch etc) use the powervr sgx core.
the N8 is surely not the first nokia to ship with a GPU. where did this misinformation come from?
naco - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
I truly cannot understand (or withstand) blind ignorance. Comments like: “wifi pathetic”, “screen res below what I would call the current industry standard”, “99 cent ARM 11 chip” are simply a clear proof that the longest time spent with an N8 was in front of a demo booth at BestBuy ... or who knows what other retailer.I have been using N8 for almost 3 months now (after using a N95 for 3 years, an Android phone for almost 2 months (HTC Desire) and a Blackberry Torch for another 2 months) and I find it to be well rounded, very responsive, fast (except for the web browser), reliable and versatile – in short, if you can live with the few current nudges, Nokia N8 is a respectable smart phone and definitely a good choice – but, hey, show me the perfect phone and I’ll buy YOU one right now. Furthermore, those few nudges, being software related can potentially (hopefully) find solutions either in a future firmware update or in adopting/installing 3rd party solutions.
POSITIVE:
- The battery, although at “only” 1200mAh lasts throughout the whole day even when used extensively,
- Fast and responsive even when pushed to the limits despite featuring “only” a 680MHz ARM processor (due to the new Qt O.S. NOT as resource hungry as Android or iOS)
- the screen is one of the best for both outdoors and indoors and for most users the resolution would never be a problem (or even noticed to be lower),
- the Ovi Maps is getting better and better and is becoming a solid, reliable (OFF LINE) navigation tool, at NO extra cost (bundled with any newer Nokia phone)
- the camera is by far one of the best out there, easily at par with most point-and-shoot standalone cameras.
- Exceptional media handling (large photos & HD videos)
- Local sync support (MS Outlook) as well as on the cloud (Google)
- Folder & sub folder support (after so much bashing, Android wants to implement it!!)
- The new OS, Qt is the bridge between Symbian and MeeGo – which means both, backward and forward compatibility.
NEGATIVE:
- Slow web browser, no reflow and not really adapted to touch screens (yet, Opera 10.1 is an excellent alternative, virtually resolving all native browser’s issues)
- Music player features, strangely downgraded from Nokia’s S60 5th edition.
- Calendar – no agenda view
- The speaker placement in the back of the phone is quite a nuisance (as the slot gets covered the sound is considerably attenuated)