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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codedivine - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
Hi, I got a score of 8995 on a Nokia N8. Were you running Opera 10.1 or were you running Opera 10.0? I am running 10.1.Voldenuit - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
Good point.I ran Rightmark Browsermark on Opera 10.0 and got 5797 points.
I ran it again with Opera 10.1 and got 9790 points.
That's a 68% improvement!
NB: The Ovi store lists Opera 10.1 on its store but actually hosts 10.0. To get 10.1, I had to manually download it from Opera.com.
Voldenuit - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
Running Sunspider on Opera Mobile 10.1 netted me a result of 10,841ms, which is 10x faster than the 10.0 result and comparable to iPhone4 performance.Definitely worth updating the article to reflect this, as it greatly changes the performance perspective of the phone.
noxplague - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
Holy crap you are right! I've been using 10.0. I just trusted the OVI store. Nokia should really fix this.Thanks for sharing!
mythun.chandra - Monday, January 17, 2011 - link
I downloaded Opera Mobile "10.1" from the Ovi Store. After seeing codedivine's comment, I checked up and it is indeed version 10.0! Why Nokia would do something like this...I'm not sure.I will re-run the Opera Mobile tests and hopefully the numbers in the article should be updated soon enough.
Thank you for pointing this out! :)
mythun.chandra - Monday, January 17, 2011 - link
Updated! :)Voldenuit - Monday, January 17, 2011 - link
Nice.Perhaps you could update the title with an '(UPDATED)' tag so people who're curious can revisit the phone? I fear that the phone's reputation has been badly damaged by the initial results showing it at the bottom of the pack.
Voldenuit - Monday, January 17, 2011 - link
PS I still think there's something funny going on with the talk time and wifi throughput figures. codedivine once mentioned to me that he got 6.5 Mbps on his N8 over wifi, which was already saturating his connection.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
Voldenuit - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
>"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)"You can indeed mark multiple messages in your inbox. Go to options, and select 'Mark'. You can now mark multiple messages by clicking on their headers in turn. You can also select 'Mark All' by selecting Options->Mark->Options->Mark All.
>"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."
The PDF reader is not supplied by Nokia. It's a lite version by Quickoffice, which wants you to pay to get the full version with text reflow and fullscreen. Not great, but not nokia's fault.
Re: stopwatch and scicalc, they're available, not every phone comes with every app under the sun, either (and that's a good thing).