I preordered my Nokia N8 on the first of October. I was offered only 3 colours to choose from; silver-white, dark-grey, and lime-green. I‘ve been looking forward to buy an orange one. Needless to say I was disappointed and chose dark-grey. They promised my piece will be in my hands by 15th October. I have been a Nokia loyalist for the past decade. Not being able to meet deadlines is a problem that Nokia has been plagued with since the very beginning. As a result I was skeptical that I would have my piece in my hands by the said date.
Lo and Behold!! I received a call on 13th of the month saying that my piece was here and awaiting for me to pick it up. And just because I preordered it they were throwing in a 4gb pendrive with it. There was another surprise waiting for me at the store. They were offering me a beautiful orange piece if I’d have it. Off course I’d have it. I’ve wanted it for eons!
So I’ve been using the n8 for the past week and here’s my noob review of the latest nokia supertoy. Bear in mind that I am a casual user and this review will be from a layman’s point of view
Hardware:
The n8 is beautifully crafted. It’s encased on most sides by aluminium. The paint is anodized so it won’t peel off (like the horrendous nokia 3600) even if u scratch it with an iron nail (please don’t try this at home though). The body feels firm and stable in the hands. It’s not too heavy. The front is made up of hardened glass which provides for the capacitive touch screen. Just like the rest of the body its scratch proof too. I haven’t used a screen guard and after 1 week at least the glass looks pristine. The weakness lies in the plastic end caps. They are the only vulnerability physically speaking, and I’ve got scratches there alreadyL. The metal body means that the n8 is marginally weaker than other nokia phones at signal reception. But it’s so marginal that you would not feel the difference in most places.
The front has only one button. This button when pressed can take you to your menu or your home screen. If long pressed it can open up a menu of all open application via which you can multitask.
The left has covered panels for inserting the simcard and the memory card. The n8 comes with 16 gb memory inbuilt and no memory card is provided with the phone itself. But the phone can happily support up to 32 GB memory cards. This side also has a micro USB port. To this port we can connect the phone to PC wire (which can also charge your phone while connected to your PC) or the USB on the go wire (with which you can brose pen drives and some hard drives)
The right has the volume rocker, the lock-unlock slider and the dedicated 2 stage camera button.
The bottom has an “oldskool” nokia charger opening.
The top has the on/off button, the HDMI port and 3.2mm stereo port.
The camera is top notch. I’ve tried to take pics in complete darkness and still managed to get crystal clear clarity in my pictures. See the pic of books below. It was shot in utter darkness with automatic settings. The video camera falters in dark but is as good as a stand alone video camera in the day. I will post some pics and videos taken with the n8 in the future.
The USB on the go supports all pendrives that I have tried. It can support hard drives which can be powered up from else where. Obviously it would be too much to ask the n8 to power up and entire hard drive.
The HDMI output is something I haven’t yet tried out. I do not have an HDTV to try that feature.
The battery charge lasts for 36 hours with moderate usage. By moderate I mean about 4 hours of music and 6 hours of adobe PDF viewer. To add to it, there is a power saver mode which can make the battery last even longer. Unnecessary animations and effects are automatically switched off when in the power saver mode. They revert back to normal when you deactivate the mode.
Top notch phones now come with 1ghz processor and 512mb ram. N8 comes with 680 MHz processor and 256mb ram. But the regular user wont feel the pinch because the symbian os is frugal with resources and manages to do exceedingly well with what it’s got. The gpu takes the burden off the cpu and makes the user experience lag free and enjoyable. Think how Mac computers can do just as much as the pc with much inferior hardware. Similarly the n8 can do as good as the HTC Desire and Apple Iphone 4 with its inferior hardware. However due to this hardware the n8 is much cheaper than its competitors. The price difference between the iphone4 and n8 in India
Software:
The symbian 3 is a huge improvement over the s60v5. It’s much faster and lag free. There are 3 home screens like the android (though top android phones now have 7). The homscreen takes a fraction of a second to switch when you swipe your finger across the screen. This is a software glitch and not a hardware limitation. The ui is programmed to change the screen with that delay. No idea why. Maybe a firmware update in the future will solve this matter.
There are some places in which the phone lags. The ‘installed applications’ section still takes forever to reload once you delete an application. The search application seems laggy sometimes. But bear in mind that it’s searching across more than 16gb of space!
The user interface is freaking ugly! The widgets seem to clutter the home screen even more. The non symbian user will hate how the phone looks and blame the operating system. Remember though that it’s the user interface which is bad. The os is very good and efficient with the hard ware it’s got.
The widgets available as of now are woefully less in number. They are however extremely useful. The menus are revamped. No more single tap/double tap problems. Long pressing things in menus can open submenus, like the android phones. Kinetic scrolling is extremely fluid due to the gpu. I can cycle through the photos, videos, sms with great speed and efficiency.
There is no qwerty keypad in the portrait mode. It only offers the standard numerical keypad in portrait. There is a full screen qwerty keypad in landscape. Though not the best this full screen qwerty is extremely good. The predictive text is excellent and you can correct your mistakes in an instant. Somehow I don’t want to use swype anymore (it’s not yet available for n8)
The net applications are still hopeless. They have too few features and are primitive The browser is slow and tedious. Fortunately there are 3rd party applications available on ovistore which can replace the void. Nokia has also promised that they will be revamping the browser in a firmware update.
The music player is very good. However it too is marred with minor glitches like not being able to add a track from the ‘recently added’ play list to a custom play list. You would have to find the song in ‘all songs/albums/artists’ menus to add to custom play list.
You get ovi suite 2.2.1.23 with the n8. The ovi suite is quick and efficient at syncing up your phone, backing it up, and updating it with the latest software. All in all the ovi suite is satisfactory with no obvious glitches.
Ovi store has some much needed applications for n8. like the opera browser which I mentioned previously. But the amount of applications available is woefully small. This may change with time however. The n8 supports most of s60v5 applications. So if you have bought something for your previous symbian phones you will be able to use it with your n8. Also Nokia has promised that all symbian 4 applications will also work on n8.
Verdict:
Nokia n8 is the best Nokia phone ever to have hit the markets. I sincerely recommend it to all nokia users. I would not advise the other brand users to shift to n8 right now. The n8 is complicated in some ways and symbian still isn’t newbie friendly. Is it an iphone killer? No. Iphone is a brand name for luxury now. Like Armani when it comes to apparel. Iphone will not be killed by anything unless they decide to mess it up themselves. However n8 is going to give the likes of Iphone , HTC desire and Samsung GalaxyS a run for their money. The fight back begins now!!!
