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
HTPC in your pocket?
So while the GPU in the N8 is competent, the display it drives is quite up to the task itself. Nokia is making use of a 3.5” AMOLED panel, running a resolution of 640x360 pixels. While certainly not the highest in terms of pixel density, it is vibrant and crisp with good contrast. The AMOLED panel on the N8 is very good and surprisingly, it actually uses a regular RGB sub-pixel grid, unlike the Pentile configuration found in most other AMOLED displays. This makes the display, in general, sharper than other AMOLED’s, especially when viewing text.
N8’s visibility outside is decent (left), but nothing great.
It has very good visibility indoors and decent visibility outdoors—especially for being an AMOLED display—but still isn’t quite as good as some regular LCD displays. Even though the N8 is Nokia’s current flagship device, it doesn’t have the outdoor-visibility enhancing ‘Clear Black Display’ technology (aka polarizing filter). The ambient light sensor does its job very well and adjusts the brightness within a second or two of change in the lighting conditions. It also does a good job of maxing-out the brightness when outdoors under sunlight, although it doesn’t seem to want to dip to the other end when in complete darkness.
The N8 excels as a camera and as a phone. But another area where it does quite well for itself is multimedia. There is another first for the N8; it is the first mobile device to sport a complete implementation of the Dolby Digital Plus standard. What this means is that the N8 is capable of streaming out 5.1 audio without any issues.
Video playback on the Nokia N8
The N8 also houses a v1.3a-spec mini HDMI connector (Dolby Digital Plus needs at least a v1.3 connection) up top that works just as it should. Connect the N8 to your TV using the included cable and you’re all set. And Nokia has paid a lot of attention to its implementation of HDMI-out on the N8. Instead of simply mirroring or cloning the N8’s display over the HDMI connection as most phones do, Nokia has implemented what it calls a “native” mode, wherein during media playback, the on-screen controls are the only thing that is displayed on the N8. The actual image/video stream is only visible on the HDTV and it is unobstructed by the playback controls. While it doesn’t really change how you would watch videos or images per se, it just goes to show the level of detail Nokia has gone into while implementing seemingly inconspicuous features.
The N8 also supports Matroska and DiVX playback out-of-the box without having to download, install or configure anything. I threw a couple of 720p DiVX trailers at it and it played them without issues. I did have some trouble with a couple of MKV’s encoded using “high-profile” (even though the specs say it supports it), and a few high-bit rate videos (I think around 10Mbit/sec is the usable limit) where I would only get the audio stream playing, as the N8 could not identify the video stream. But it was awesome to just drop stuff off onto the N8 and watch it go. If I found one issue with the video player on the N8, it has to be its inability to resume playback from where it left off; whether this means you explicitly press pause and close the video player or just directly switch over to another app, the N8 starts playing back the video from the very start every time.
The N8’s excellent media handling coupled with USB OTG make it a great basic ‘HTPC’
And speaking of go, the N8 is one of the few devices that supports the USB OTG (On-the-Go) standard which allows it to act as a USB host for certain devices. Once again, this works flawlessly. I copied a couple of ripped videos onto a USB drive, plugged it into the N8 (via the supplied USB to micro-USB dongle) and the N8 immediately picks up the drive as a mass-storage device and lets me browse its contents. Again, no need to install or configure anything. The only restriction here is that the drives must be FAT32 formatted, not NTFS. The N8 is capable of providing up to 200mA over its micro-USB port, but I could use externally powered devices (such as my 1TB external drive) without any issues. I tried using a bunch of devices such as USB flash drives, digital cameras and they all seem to work fine. But I had two portable drives that understandably didn’t work with the N8 because of power requirements; I could just hear them power up and down continuously.
Just out of curiosity, I tried connecting a Logitech EX100 wireless Keyboard+Mouse combo and it worked! I could use the mouse to navigate and interact with the menus without any fuss and in seconds I was typing out emails on the N8 through the keyboard. This really does make it a viable HTPC option. Nokia has also thrown in an FM radio (with the wired headset acting as an antenna) and the N8 can also act as an FM transmitter. While not entirely useful in this day and age where almost every vehicle comes with at least an AUX IN jack, it certainly is a nifty feature for those who don’t have any other means of streaming audio through their vehicles speaker setup. In my brief use of the N8 as an FM transmitter, it did quite well even in areas with multiple transmitting stations.
And Nokia has another bit of surprise here. The N8 comes with 16GB memory built-in that can be expanded using microSD cards, currently giving you a maximum storage capacity of 48GB. While a lot of phones currently available come with large amounts of storage memory, in my experience, I rarely ever end up using more than a couple of gigabytes simply because of the painfully slow transfer speeds. Not so with the N8. I have recorded sustained read speeds of 13MB/sec and write speeds of about 10MB/sec. This means I can transfer a 700MB video in a little over a minute. Have a look the numbers below for comparison.
| Device | Read (MB/s) | Write (MB/s) |
| Nokia N8-00 16GB | ~13 MB/s | ~10 MB/s |
| Palm Pre Plus 16GB | ~15 MB/s | 1.5 MB/s |
| ADATA C802 4GB | ~13 MB/s | ~4 MB/s |
I couldn’t get more specific information on the Toshiba THGBM1G7D4FBA13 MCP used part used in the Nokia N8, but it contains four 32Gbit Toshiba-Sandisk MLC NAND die along with a flash controller.
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Voldenuit - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
"Mobile devices are service-enabling platforms, not software-execution platforms."BOOM-Tish! Somebody give this man a dollar, he's hit the nail on the head!
As mithun said in his review, if a faster processor does not enable more functionality, all it's doing is sucking more power.
Yes, we all want the latest and greatest, but it seems nokia made the smart move by focusing on the GPU and coupling it with a CPU that's just fast enough for its needs.
The 3GS was a marked improvement on the 3G in terms of speed and responsiveness, but the N8 is about as responsive as the 3GS using a much slower CPU because of its more compact/efficient OS and being smart about offloading to the GPU when needed. This is what fusion should be about.
anactoraaron - Thursday, January 13, 2011 - link
I do see your point, however every other phone manufacturer is always updating to the "latest and greatest" while still keeping power usage under control. ...how do they do this? tech as it evolves gets smaller- and I shouldn't need to explain moore's law to anyone here. The phone software shoud be optimized to the latest and greatest to take advantage of BOTH the speed AND power usage of the device.Selling the nexus one with eclair and reselling it a year later with gingerbread without improving anything from a hardware perspective is what I see Nokia doing here. All they have done is re-optimize symbian to offload as much work as possible to the gpu. But I would almost guarantee a faster cpu would speed up the browser. And then they would have to reoptimize that and the juggling act nokia has done here starts all over.
I wonder why the N900 isn't included with the benchmarks of this phone? Let's see... Sunspider benchmark... N900: 37816.... N8-00 (with opera 10- default browser is slower): 100029. So you can say "service-enabling platform" but if you're not optimizing the platform for commonly used tasks - AGAIN for a regularly executed function (web browsing, phone calls) than what are you optimizing it for? But Nokia decided that those thing weren't that important and while you get great battery life 3G browsing (wifi numbers will likely be similiar) - by sipping a slower cpu to save that battery life you get a HORRIBLE browsing experience.
I called this phone a "turd" because I view it as a step backwards from the N900 (the former and maybe still flagship Nokia phone) redesigned symbian and all.
'quote' but the N8 is about as responsive as the 3GS using a much slower CPU because of its more compact/efficient OS and being smart about offloading to the GPU when needed.
So you're saying that it's not as fast as the 3GS. This is their NEW flagship phone! And it's "about as responsive as a 3GS"- again a phone that's 1.5 years old! I simply want BETTER from Nokia to restart the "off contract" or "unlocked" market and this phone FAILS at doing so. I truly believe the N900 is a great phone! There are simply faster, much more responsive, longer battery life, all in all better phones out than this one (N8-00) right now.
Are they still planning on all but killing off symbian with meego (should it come out)? That would have to influence a purchase decision also.
Voldenuit - Thursday, January 13, 2011 - link
iPhone4 isn't faster than 3GS either. In fact, in some benchmarks, it's slower (because of the higher resolution display).3GS was significant because its speedup over the older models represented a milestone in device responsiveness and user expectations.
A phone which is faster than the 3GS would probably go unnoticed among many users, but one which is significantly slower would not be accepted.
The N8 is definitely snappy enough to fall into the first camp.
While AT is a tech site and its phone reviews are understandably geared towards the technical details and specifications of the chips that go into the phones, hardware specs are not the be all and end all of a smartphone. For most smartphone tasks, the N8 is quite up to the job.
Yes, the browser is in definite need of improvement, I'm using Opera Mobile on it right now and even that is not fantastic, but it's enough for my purposes as the other advantages of the N8 (GPS, pentaband 3G, camera) outweighed it over the current crop of Android and iOS devices for my specific needs.
ojisama - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
I guess you didn't read the part about GPU. "Most of the heavy lifting in the N8 is done by the BCM2727". "Using an A8 Cortex-based 1Ghz+ part here to run Symbian^3 would have been overkill and power-inefficient."dagamer34 - Thursday, January 13, 2011 - link
As snappy as the 3GS except the 3GS is almost TWO YEARS OLD.AssBall - Thursday, January 13, 2011 - link
Funny, since most contracts are for TWO YEARS.Not every idiot gets a new phone every 6 months. Nokia has always been especially good at call quality, above other stuff. You know, in case you actually use your phone to CALL PEOPLE instead of some kind of nerdwit multimedia toy.
Exodite - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
While is has its issues to be sure, the browser being one of them, it's actually an awesome device as soon as you consider the phone implications.Audio quality is excellent and reception better than any handset I've used. The camera really deserves even more praise as it's not just better than those offered by current high-end smartphones but entirely in a league of its own.
Then there's the many convenient features like USB-on-the-go, BT keayboard and mouse connectivity, FM transmitter, 5.1 audio output, native DivX and MKV support etc.
My better half has one and running 3G and Wi-Fi enabled 24/7, live Twitter feeds and gmail updates through widgets, as well as snapping shots with the Xenon flash and playing the odd games she still gets about 3 days worth of battery out of the device.
It's awesome, as long as you want a phone with media functions and not the other way around.
That's not to say it's perfect but all the issues are really related to software and we can only hope Nokia takes fixing them to heart. Indeed, the only hardware omission I find annoying is a LED lamp for video and use as a torch.
Funny as it may sound I've actually come to rely on using my phone as a torch.
I have to say that I expected a bit more from this review, RightMark Audio Analyser tests, reception and signal strength tests, a more detailed look into the camera and image quality options.
That's not to say it's a bad review, only that the real strengths of this handset aren't immediately obvious to the same extent that its flaws are.
Voldenuit - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
"The camera really deserves even more praise as it's not just better than those offered by current high-end smartphones but entirely in a league of its own."Yes. It's 6 times bigger than the sensor on the iPhone4. SIX TIMES!!!
Something to chew on for a while.
Re: LED torch functionality, I can understand why it's missing (compared to previous nokias) because the Xenon flash is not designed for continuous output and the AF assist lamp is red (although I actually prefer the red setting on my 3rd party torch app to preserve nightvision in the dark).
I also notice that signal attenuation tests are missing from this review - maybe that's due to technical issues in measuring gain from the antenna?
Agreed that it's easier to point out the flaws than the strengths - the whole is better than the sum of its parts, because while all smartphones have their strengths, the N8 is very well balanced in its abilities. Some phones might do X or Y better, but the N8 excels at doing nearly everything consistently well (push email support aside, which is coming, and which has workarounds) and does some things (like Bluetooth 3, FM transmitter) that other phones don't even try to.
melgross - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
Awesome? Yeah, in mid 2009. Right now, the only thing that's awesome about this is that it's their top model, considering how backwards it it.All I can get from this review is that it's ok in most areas, not so hot in the others, and has a camera that's batter than in other phones but not so great when compared to dedicated compacts. That is, if you know something about photography.
Exodite - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
Which is why I expected a more in-depth review in the first place.The N8 is priced like a mid-range smartphone but offer a lot of non-obvious advantages to the competition.
In my personal experience:
* Call/audio quality.
* Reception.
* Build quality/toughness.
* Battery life.
* Camera.
* Features (USB OTG, BT mouse/keyboard, FM transmitter, DivX/MKV playback, free GPS navigation with no roaming fees etc.)
* Design (like the two-stage dedicated camera button, hardware screen-lock snap-slider, lock-screen clock etc.)
Granted, it's not a handset for everyone but what is?
My ideal phone would be a Nokia design with Samsung electronics and HTC software and services but until that surfaces we have to make compromises. :)
In the case of Nokia those compromises are software related, like the browser and inconsistent services.
I could find equally serious issues with other high-end handsets, like the Desire HD and iPhone 4, but that doesn't mean that those devices don't deserve to be called 'awesome' as well.