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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mythun.chandra - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
Sorry you didn't find the review as useful.Regarding the CPU, not sure where the confusion lies:
"This MCP (Multi Chip Package) allows Samsung to stack different memory types (DDR, NAND etc.) along with non-memory logic in the same low-power package. So for basically the same footprint as a single memory chip, Samsung is able to integrate the DDR memory (256MB), NAND (512MB) and a CPU (TI ARM11 applications processor)."
What that says is that Nokia uses a Samsung MCP which stacks DDR and NAND memory, along with a TI ARM-11 based application processor in the same package.
thartist - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
They'd better pull off "an AMD" before they completely sink the ship. Btw, quite a late review!tipoo - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
I like AMD, but...What? Is that really the best choice for a come-back story? Staying under a quarter of the marketshare, and even less of the revenue?zodiacfml - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
nevermind the internet which i could do at home..always wanted to carry a camera all the time, it's good enough as any P&S in 2003-05. I wonder if it could have manual controls..especially manual use of flash.
very nice it could read usb storage devices, i was thinking of buying a netbook for backup/ net upload of photos taken while on a vacation.
it could read mkv and divx, awesome.
call it quirky but not to me as having a quirky Sigma dp2 digital camera.
now, where could i get one....
Voldenuit - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
You can control ISO (100-800) and EV (+/- 2 EV in 0.5 stop steps). You can set the flash to on/off, auto, red-eye and slow-sync (or a close simulacrum thereof) by invoking the night portrait mode.There is a macro mode, although it does not do anything close to 1:1, but it's better than nothing.
Exposure on the N8 is uncannily good, although I'm coming from m43 and DSLR where the exposure algorithms are not as advanced (some would say idiot-proof) as compact cameras. Flash exposure is also very good (considering the power limitations).
Noise reduction is very well balanced - Nokia has stated that they erred on the side of detail over smoothness, and it shows (in a good way). Should you want to PP away more noise, the onboard editing app has a NR filter.
My big gripe is there is no touch-to-focus, but that's nothing a little focus-recompose can't get around.
I imagine someone could eventually write an app to enable touchscreen focus, shutter speed control, ND filter use and/or RAW output, but I've found the existing controls more than sufficient for my needs as a backup camera. If I need more than that, I should be packing my DSLR anyway.
PS If you want to pair a USB drive with the phone, avoid the ones with virtual/security partitions. It doesn't like them that much (won't work with my Sandisk Cruzer, no problem with my vanilla flash drives).
Voldenuit - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
OK, scratch that last thumbdrive comment. I just checked my thumbdrive and it seems I formatted in NTFS, which the N8 doesn't support. My bad.zodiacfml - Thursday, January 13, 2011 - link
thank you for all that information. good luck with it!inaphasia - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
There were NO 12Mp 28mm P&S' in 2005... let alone 2003!There were hardly any in 2007!:)
mrgreenfur - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
"basic point snf shoots" on page 8...uselessguy - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
That is one ugly phone!