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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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?