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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Voldenuit - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
Hehe, my bad then! ^_^akse - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
I'm guessing MeeGo at first will be mobile computers. Something like N900 with better phone software and features.Something very high end and special. But as things seems to evolve in direction where most smartphones are close to a mobile computer in coming years, Symbian3 will probably be adopted to all their phones that they call Smartphones and maybe cheaper mobile computers, while MeeGo being on the high end phones/mobile computers.
Nokia made the right decision to ditch Symbian^4 and decide to bring its updates as smaller updates to Symbian^3 devices.
I've been using N900 for a year now and it can do almost anything, but recently I've really been wanting to buy N8 because I want a phone, but with huge amount of other features. N900 is mostly a computer with phone :)
bigboxes - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
I don't know about you, but my smartphone is a mobile computer. It's a computer first and a phone second. No need to wait for the future.Voldenuit - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
PS, the N900 was capable of video calling on Skype, hopefully, the N8 will receive similar functionality soon.Exodite - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
Discussion on the Skype forums promised an update to address S^3 compatibility issues before the end of last year (I don't know if that materialized or not) and a refresh bringing video calling support to S^3 devices later this year.That's a month or two ago though and if there's been further developments I don't know.
Meaker10 - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
Sensor size in fractions of an inch? Lense size in mm?Why not just keep it all sane in mm?
Voldenuit - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
That's how camera makers report their (compact) sensor sizes. Has to do with legacy TV tube conventions iirc.at0m - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
great review, the n8 is not for everyone but it has it's fans ( me included ). it has plenty of apps, takes a great picture, has clean audio output and the bonus hdmi. not to mention ovimaps has turned into a great navigation tool. top that off with 3g on all carriers and it works for me. There are some updates right around the corner hopefully to help get the software more in line.. symbian isn't as flashy as android but it has quite a bit of maturity behind it with some more love to the UI it could be perfect.on the GPU it actually marks a return to a discrete GPU as opposed to the first instance. the n82 and n95 both had dedicated GPU's and dual core CPUs :)
Lapoki - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
You really cant take Nokia love out of an Indian no matter where he lives in the world....just like cricket
mcjw - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
I'm sorry but coming from Anandtech's N900/Droid review, this review is quite a let down.There is no technical information you cannot get from one or 2 press releases, and the entire article reads like a rehash of all the N8 customer reviews Amazon.com, scratching just the surface.
The only insight I might have gotten is where you mentioned the CPU. But there the language is vague, leaving me with even more questions: Samsung or TI processor? Your language make it sound like you are not sure.
So please, show a bit of expertise in your topic rather than writing out the obvious in running prose. Is this too much to expect from Anandtech?