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
Conclusion
Now is not a good time to be Nokia. Once the king of the (smartphone) hill with an overwhelming majority of the smartphone market share, the lack of evolving to changing consumer demands in a fast enough manner has seen its smartphone share plummet. With Apple and Google thoroughly beating Nokia in its traditionally weak markets (North America for example), and taking the fight to its traditional strongholds (Europe and Asia), they don’t seem to be showing any signs of slowing things down. In fact, it almost seems too little too late for Nokia with the N8 and Symbian^3. Had the N8 launched at the end of 2009 or the beginning of 2010, before the explosion of Android slate devices and the iPhone 4, the N8 would have clearly been the best smartphone with little competition.
But it’s not all so gloomy. Nokia still commands massive brand recall in a lot of major markets. And the N8-00 is a solid smartphone; hands-down the best mainstream phone Nokia has put forth to date (again, ignoring the outlier than N900 is). In fact, Nokia sells the N8-00 as a ‘mobile computer’ and while I’ve always thought of this as being a marketing gimmick for their Nseries devices, I am fairly convinced that the N8 actually befits this tag. With most definitely the best camera ever seen on a mobile phone, the N8 is a worthy replacement to basic point snf shoots. With excellent media handling capabilities, HDMI out and the very useful USB-To-Go capability, the N8 actually fulfills basic HTPC duties with no fuss. And Ovi Maps, a definitely capable replacement for dedicated navigation devices. As is clear from this review, Nokia has made sure to implement whatever features it has included in the N8, with great attention to detail. And thankfully this time, this attention to detail has also mostly translated to the software side of things…traditionally Nokia’s weakness.
Symbian^3 is a definite and marked improvement over the previous Series 60 5th Edition without any doubt. With Symbian^3, Nokia has finally entered the modern smartphone market and it makes a strong showing here. There still are issues that Nokia needs to fix ASAP—the browser, mail application and Ovi Store being the major ones. If Nokia executes on the continuous and ongoing incremental updates to the Symbian^3 platform that it has committed to, in a timely manner, we may finally have a Nokia device that we can recommend without any obvious compromises or flaws. And with one such update promised for the N8 sometime in Q1 2011, it may be the device to recommend, after the update.
As an interesting side note, the Nokia C7 is a cheaper alternative to the N8. If the top-notch camera in the N8 doesn’t pique your interest and you’re willing to forego half the storage (now 8GB), you will get everything else the N8 has to offer, potentially better battery life, plus NFC-support, for a decent amount less than the N8.
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tipoo - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
Yeah, apart from the camera I don't see much good here. Battery life below middle of the road, browser performance at the bottom of the pack, inferior OS, app store lags behind iOS and Android, etc. An equivalent camera on an Android phone or the iPhone 5 would be nice.vol7ron - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
With no optical zoom, I'm not even sure I need a 12MP camera. It's nice, but digital zoom is worthless.To me, the best part about the phone is the xenon flash.
Exodite - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
Isn't that a bit counter-intuitive?With digital zoom you'd ideally want more pixels to avoid losing to much detail when you use it.
vol7ron - Saturday, January 15, 2011 - link
You'd want more MP, but it's pointless, because even when it tries to interpolate the pixels, there is still distortion, even when you scale it down. Some sort of optical zoom is def more ideal.GSJ - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
What could have been if it ran Android.........warisz00r - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
Optimus One performace for Galaxy S price?xype - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
"And with one such update promised for the N8 sometime in Q1 2011, it may be the device to recommend, after the update."Oh, _please_. That's almost Android-level optimism, here. It might get an update at some point, the update might be good, it might make everything right and better.
Have a look at how many Android phones are running 2.3, how many 2.1 phones got 2.2 updates, how many people applied those and combine with how long it took Google to actually get halfway where iOS is with its ecosystem and you'll get an idea about what Nokia can _eventually_ accomplish if they get _everything_ right.
In short: no, it won't be the device to recommend.
Samus - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
You're comparing Nokia to Google. The difference in phone software experience is over two decades apart.Nokia updates and supports their products exceptionally well, probably better than any other phone manufacture.
warisz00r - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
lolno they dont.Suffering E72 user here.
Samus - Thursday, January 13, 2011 - link
Suffering how? I had an E73 Mode for a few months before I plucked down $400 for the N8-00, and the only pain with it was getting outbound emails to work correctly for my business email...gmail and hotmail worked flawlessly. After tweaking everything, the phone worked flawlessly and I was satisfied enough to buy another Nokia.If you have an E72 with AT&T, that might explain many of your problems because they really screwed up the OS. T-mobile is traditionally "hands-off" with core system software and most ATT people on the forums talk about just unlocking a factory E71 or E73 from T-mobile to use on ATT. They work a lot better.