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
Down to the numbers
Nokia has packed the N8 to the gills with features and this trend continues on with the connectivity. The N8 boasts support for 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0 (both powered by a TI WL1271A chip), and yes, the N8 is a quad-band GSM and penta-band 3G/3.5G phone. What this means is that you will have complete voice and 3G/3.5Gdata coverage practically anywhere in the world. Looks like Brian has had his prayers answered! And if set so, the N8 can automatically switch between GSM and UMTS bands, depending on availability.
| Nokia N8-00—Network Support | |||||
| Penta-Band UMTS | 850 / 900 / 1700 / 1900 / 2100 MHz | ||||
| Quad-Band GSM/EDGE | 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 MHz | ||||
| HSDPA/HSUPA | 10.2Mbps / 2.0Mbps | ||||
But in spite of packing in so much hardware, the Nokia N8 put out some decent battery life numbers. And this is a bit surprising considering the fact that the N8 comes packed with the same 1200mAh BL-4D battery as the decidedly lower end E5!
*Just like with the E5, the N8’s default browser would stop loading the AT test suite pages (only over WiFi) after a couple of iterations without closing the browser and manually restarting the test.
Although I couldn’t test it specifically, the GSM-only talk time battery life of the N8 seemed a decent bit more than the 3G battery life, as I was able to get away with moderate non-3G voice and data usage for about 2.5 days without having to recharge.
Now down to the performance numbers. As mentioned earlier, the N8 unfortunately has the same browser as the E5 and as such, shows similarly poor performance.
Update: As pointed out in the comments by astute observers, the version of Opera 10 tested from the Ovi Store is incorrectly labeled 10.1 when it is in fact 10.0. We've installed and tested Opera 10.1 on the N8 and updated the graphs below to reflect the correct results for both 10.0 and 10.1. Browsermark shows an improvement of nearly 94%, and SunSpider has gone up almost 9x, which is a nice improvement to say the least.
As Brian pointed out in his GLBenchmark article, we’ve included some numbers for the N8. GLBenchmark does not yet officially support Symbian^3, and the version I ran on the N8 was for S60 5th Edition. Although I didn’t have any issues running other S50 5th edition apps, the Egypt test in the GLBenchmark suite refused to run on the N8. It would show the loading screen for some time and then exit to the home screen. I have included numbers for the PRO test below.
As you can see, while no SGX 540, the BCM2727 in the N8 is almost on par with the Adreno 205 and SGX 535 GPU’s, though the test runs at 640x360 on the N8 compared to 800x480 on most other devices we have numbers for.
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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.