Nokia N8 (7)

So far then, in the previous 14,000 words, we’ve covered the Nokia N8 from most angles, concluding that it has generally excellent hardware, a superlative camera, great multimedia performance and is only brought down to earth by some middling Internet-facing applications. There’s more to the N8 and this new generation of Nokia-made Symbian^3 phones, however, with a number of technologies that are either new to Symbian or new to the smartphone world in general. In this review part we’ll look at each and try out where necessary – how significant is each to the wider N8 user?

 

USB on the go

All the new Symbian^3 devices with the new chipsets from Nokia have ‘USB on the Go’ functionality, although only the N8 has the CA-157 adapter cable supplied in the box. The principal purpose of USB on the Go is to let these new phones access data and media on USB disks (‘memory sticks’), as shown below:

With a USB disk (‘memory stick’/’thumbdrive’) connected using ‘USB on the Go’, here viewing a spreadsheet from the disk.

Interestingly, the new microUSB ports from Nokia have a slightly expanded aperture, allowing for a squarer profile for the CA-157 connector, which conforms to the new standard (for USB on the go), Micro-AB. This is similar to the extUSB system used by HTC for their mini-USB-but-with-extra-features connector a few years ago. The idea is that all microUSB cables will fit the N8 (and other Symbian^3 phones) but that the CA-157 will only fit the Nokia phones (and any other future USB on the Go hosts). The physical difference hopefully stops confusion with users of other phones ‘trying the adapter anyway’, with predictable disappointment.

The CA-157 adapter contains support for the previously unused (in microUSB) fourth pin in the standard connector. In USB on the Go, this is used as an ‘ID’ pin and the adapter is recognised by the N8 as soon as the cable is inserted. There’s a pause of a few seconds while the file system is read by Symbian OS and then you’re off and browsing in File manager and all files can be opened in just the same was as if they were on the mass memory or microSD. Disk letters are assigned as needed (so usually starting at “G:”), though you can stretch this further, as shown below, using a USB reader and SD, SmartMedia and CF disks all plugged in at once, albeit with a performance penalty – I was using an old hub and access times were greater than 10 seconds per operation!

Getting a little silly, but I tried plugging in a hub/card reader with three (small) disks of different kinds all inserted. All disks came up in File manager (check out the drive letters!), though performance wasn’t good. Possibly due to the age of my card reader, possibly due to multiple disks not really being what USB on the Go was intended for. Mind you, with 16GB onboard and a 32GB microSD, I could add 64GB plus 8GB plus 32GB on this ensemble if I’d wanted to, a total of 142GB on my N8! Gulp.

For straightforward USB memory sticks though, you’ll have few problems. The biggest use case for this feature is being out at an event and getting PR material handed to you on memory stick. Normally you’d have to have a laptop handy to read this, but if you carry the CA-157 adapter then there’s no reason why you couldn’t access much of the material on the N8.

Hardcore geeks have had plenty of fun around the world trying other USB accessories to see what works and what doesn’t, including a mouse (brings up an on-screen cursor and even scroll wheels work!), a keyboard (works as expected in text fields) and various hard disks. Now, powering a hard disk takes some power and most of the latter experiments have been rather less successful. USB hard disks with their own power sources may work, but I’ll not guarantee it, for many reasons, not least because USB on the go only works with standard FAT(32) file systems and so HFS and NTFS and other schemes on hard disks just won’t work.

USB on the go does offer other exciting possibilities, not least the recently announced DAB Radio accessory (review coming soon from Rafe) and the also announced Mobile TV (DVB-H) accessory, though both solutions depend heavily on local digital ‘over the air’ coverage in your country, of course.

 

HDMI out

The N8 and E7 both have a mini-HDMI port on their top edges, covered with a tethered plug. The CA-156 adapter from this to a ‘full’ HDMI connector is supplied with the N8 in the box again (though not in the E7’s, curiously), as shown.

It’s a straight through solution this time, no added pin connections, but the accessory is needed because the full HDMI connector would be too big to plug into the slim form of a modern phone. Plug the N8 into the adapter and then this into a normal HDMI cable to the back of your HDMI-ready TV and you’ve got a full 720p video feed from one to the other. Normal nHD screen output from the standard applications is upsampled to 720p and looks clean enough, if a bit pixellated, while photos and videos are output at the maximum appropriate resolution, up to 720p.

Armed with USB on the go (above), it’s again easy for geeks to go crazy, using USB or Bluetooth mouse and keyboard, along with HDMI out to produce a huge-screened ‘computer’, but for most users the main use case will definitely be media playback, and principally video. Certainly with 16GB to fill on the mass memory and potentially another 32GB on microSD, there’s plenty of scope for keeping a number of movies stashed away for bored moments in hotel rooms – though this does rather suppose that the hotel rooms are equipped with accessible and high-spec TVs! Many people will be limited to using the HDMI out to show off recently captured 720p video to friends and family at the end of a day trip – itself a pretty compelling use case.

Its worth noting that if your home TV isn’t HDMI-compatible, the ‘old’ composite cable solution (used by Nokia since the days of the N93) will still work fine, though only at analogue nHD-mapped-to-match-your-TV resolution (the exact details are complicated) – better than nothing, but not ideal, plus there’s no control over aspect ratio, everything will be black-barred (left and right or top and bottom). And you’d have to source the cable separately, since there’s not one in the box (I used the one supplied with my old N95).

 

Dolby Digital Plus

To go along with HDMI out, there’s hardware support for decoding of Dolby Digital Plus ‘surround sound’ audio when found in a video stream. A couple of demo videos are included on the Nokia N8’s mass memory (and are great for impressing friends), but there’s no obvious route for general users to source suitable material at the moment. Roll on a Nokia movie store?

Video captured with the N8’s camera will have a ‘simple’ AAC-encoded stereo soundtrack and most of the videos you’ll have downloaded from the Internet (from – ahem – various sources) will be similar. Having Dolby Digital Plus is a big spec ‘feather’ in the N8’s cap but in reality is unlikely to be used by many people in the short term.

 

Multiple Bluetooth connections, Bluetooth v3.0

The N8 and its sister devices now conform to the base specification for Bluetooth 3.0, though it’s not known if they’ll also work with Bluetooth 3.0+HS (High Speed) accessories, since we don’t have any to try with yet. In theory, Bluetooth 3.0 means being able to piggyback data on local Wi-fi networks, but again until we get compatible routers and firmware, this is all untested.

What is known is that the N8 can communicate with multiple Bluetooth devices at the same time – so a headset and keyboard, or a mouse and keyboard (if you’re a geek). With simultaneous connections being a major hassle on previous deices, it’s good to see and hear that these issues are now a thing of the past.

One aspect of Bluetooth not always appreciated by reviewers of other devices is that Nokia’s phones support a wider range of Bluetooth ‘profiles’ than any other phone company. In the N8’s case, the list is A2DP, AVRCP, BIP, DUN, FTP, GAP, GAVDP, GOEP, HFP, HSP, OPP, PBAP, SAP and SPP. By comparison, one world famous smartphone took a year or so to support just A2DP. Going into what each profile does is beyond the scope of this feature, but see here for full definitions.

 

Pentaband

Unique in the smartphone world, all four of Nokia’s new Symbian^3 designs are full pentaband phones, working on the (take a deep breath) 850, 900, 1700, 1900 and 2100 MHz 3G bands. In terms of speeds, up to 10.2 Mbps is achievable with HSDPA ‘Cat9’, where supported by the regional network/towers.

In practice, this means that you can travel anywhere in the world and, subject to your SIM being recognised and allowing data roaming, you’ll be able to connect at full 3G speeds as well as any local (usually dual-band) handsets. In addition, there’s the usual quad-band GSM set of frequencies, for backing up pentaband 3G when out in the country.

Squeezing pentaband radios/antennae into the N8 demonstrates Nokia’s mastery of the art, made even more impressive on the N8 because of the largely aluminium construction, meaning that all the antennae have to be in the two plastic end caps – and space has also to be found for the antennae for Bluetooth, Wi-fi, GPS and FM transmitter, all of which also seem to work very well. Impressive.

 

Digital microphones

Debuted on the N86 8MP was a MEMS (MicroElectrical-Mechanical System) microphone (see here for more on MEMS), effectively a microphone on a chip – audio in on its flat side and amplified CD-quality digital sound out directly into Symbian’s audio modules. The results were stunning and the same MEMS chip has been used on the N8, as shown below. Audio is again stellar – I used the term CD-quality above, by which I mean that the difference between conventional smartphone captured audio and that on the N8 is analagous to the difference between going from cassette tape to CD – the jump is very noticeable and, once used for real projects, it’s hard to go back and accept anything less.

The MEMS microphone (digital microphone on-a-chip) on the Nokia N8 motherboard

 

Symbian^3 new features

Although some would judge Symbian from its UI only, it’s worth noting a number of innovations in the new version of the OS for the N8:

• A new IP networking architecture, which “significantly improves data flow performance” and also “implements automatic roaming between different access points, for example WLAN and GPRS.” Also helping to reduce the number of connection dialogs is ‘One-Click Connectivity’ (OCC), which “makes the user’s interaction with “connecting” and “select access point” dialogs significantly simpler and easier.”
• Assisted GPS is improved by supporting no less than two SUPL servers for serving up satellite ephemeris data (in case one server’s not available)

  

• Native H.264 encoding for video capture now full supported, for higher quality
• A wide range of media codecs are now built-in as standard. As far as I know, the widest in the smartphone world. On the video side, for example, the codecs include 3GPP formats (H.263), D-1, Flash Video, H.264/AVC, MPEG-4, RealVideo 10, Sorenson Spark, VC-1, VP6 and WMV 9. Although DivX/XviD codecs aren’t explicit, many DivX files (from my tests, at least) seem to use one of the above codecs to handle the video compression, and so will work, as-is.
• Visual multitasking, nicknamed ‘Teleport’. Each application screen is frozen at the instant of long pressing the ‘home’ button and shown in thumbnail form, so you can see where each app is up to.

Camera firsts

Although I’ve specifically covered the Nokia N8’s camera in part 2 of this review, it’s worth re-emphasising here some of the technology firsts in this department. The N8 has the largest sensor ever put into a phone – 1/1.83″ – plus it has the innovative intelligent digital zoom in video mode, whereby zooming in uses more than just the centre of the sensor and thus keeps the full 720p resolution up to 3x zoom, just as optical zoom would…

Plus there’s the use of Xenon flash, still a rarity in the smartphone world, plus MEMS digital microphones, giving far higher audio quality than most competing devices.

Screen technology

And it would be appropriate to also mention the screen tech used in the N8 (and C7). Adding an ‘anti-reflection’ layer doesn’t sound like much and Nokia has been at pains to say that this isn’t the same as their CBD (Clear Black Display) technology, but to all intents and purposes it’s close, in terms of outdoor screen visibility. And, in a world where many smartphones across the world have had awful screens outdoors for years and where the tide is only just beginning to turn (with Samsung’s Super AMOLED, for example), I do consider even the anti-reflective screen on the N8 to be an innovation.

CBD, on the C6-01 and E7, promises to raise outdoor contrast even further, by not only reducing reflections but getting close to effectively eliminating them altogether.

Source : http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/reviews/item/12267_Nokia_N8_part_6-Cutting_edge_t.php

 

Nokia N8 (6)

So far then, we’ve established the N8 as having a superlative camera, great hardware and build quality, good multimedia handling and gaming and ‘good enough’ email and web applications. The theme through all of these review parts is generally very positive, though we’ve pulled no punches at pointing out some of the negatives and any relevant caveats.

The same feeling is going to run through this review part, in which I wanted to look at the N8 from the point of view of day to day use and round up some of the application and interface features which haven’t been mentioned in depth so far. Whereas with many other Nokia smartphones of the last couple of years it had been a case of piling up pros and cons more or less equally for each, with the N8 there’s a definite bias towards a smartphone that it’s hard for someone with even a passing acquaintance with the Symbian OS to dislike.

Performance issues?

Which is not to say that someone coming from the iPhone or Android smartphone worlds won’t have a darned good go (at disliking it). As an example of this, and as a launching point for some of my own opinions and rebuttals, here’s a typical blogger ‘comparison’, from Edward Umana (in the USA) – clearly something of an Android fan but also passingly acquainted with Symbian – who makes the following points:

“Very large web pages cause Web to struggle”. The example shown is Engadget.com, whose desktop-designed site currently runs to just over 2.2MB of code, javascript, images and other objects. In one sense, there’s no defense here – with the N8’s RAM and processor, it should be able to download and decode this large a page, with all content and still stay responsive. It’s clear that a totally re-written 2010 Symbian web browser with, in particular, a faster javascript engine can’t come soon enough (Opera Mobile is here now and Nokia’s new browser is a month or two away).

On the other hand, the Engadget page is a particularly complex entity – it’s telling that tapping on ‘Stop’ halfway through the loading of engadget.com (to terminate the interpreting of much of the Javascript and the loading of any extraneous objects) results in a page that’s very responsive and that it’s clearly this last content that’s causing the problem. I tried the desktop versions of Mobile Burn and Gdgt, both equally ‘heavy’ pages and, after letting the page load completely, had little problem scrolling around and zooming.

A core issue isn’t actually that some pages don’t appear to load fully or freeze – it’s that Web’s performance while loading isn’t well optimised. On the iPhone and Android browsers (all based on versions of the core Webkit engine), it’s possible to scroll around even before all the images and animations have fully loaded – from the user’s point of view this is a natural thing to want to do (though as a programmer I’m thinking “No, let the page load before trying to confuse the application!”) Hopefully the new version of Web will be much better at this sort of ‘parallel’ activity.

In the real world, of course, loading desktop class, Javascript-heavy sites from the gadget world is arguably extreme behaviour. In most cases, normal people will type in a site URL and be directed to the appropriate ‘mobile’-optimised site (bbc.co.uk is a good example of this). Unsurprisingly, such sites work beautifully on the N8 – though it’s not always appreciated that a number of mobile sites don’t work well on the iPhone, for example (the sparse layout confuses Safari’s algorithms). With the 16:9 portrait screen and an emphasis on one-handed use, it’s fair to say that many N8 owners are unlikely to either want to browse full-on desktop web sites or have problems viewing the content they’re after.

So I’m not giving Web a free pass here – but it’ll do for 99% of owners until its replacement becomes available in an over-the-air update later in 2010, a month or two from now.

“Autocompleting web addresses isn’t obvious” (because of the dichotomy between the URL bar itself and the Symbian text entry screen). In other words, you can start typing “all” on an Android phone and the browser’s auto-complete will show you matches from your history because the keyboard itself is overlaid on the main browser screen. With touch entry on Symbian OS, both T9 and QWERTY virtual keyboards are brought up full-screen, giving maximum area for clear entry but at the expense of being able to see the page the keyboard was ‘called’ from. In fact, you can type “all” and then tap on the green ‘tick’ and you’ll see the auto-complete proferring suggestions, in just the same way as Android or desktop browsers – but because the user is typically focussed on the raw text entry, they may not know about exiting this screen and seeing what Web has to suggest.

I doubt this text entry method, much maligned in some N8 reviews, is going to change overnight. Personally, I don’t think it’s a huge issue and find the iPhone/Android/Windows Mobile technique, wherein you see a bit of the underlying page and have to scroll around like mad to try and see the right dialog line, potentially more confusing. But this is obviously a personal preference.

As an aside, the blogger refers to the portrait T9 keypad as ‘annoying’. This is understandable from the point of view of someone young, brought up on a diet of iPhone etc, but readers here will appreciate that in portrait mode a standard phone-like keypad is going to be both quick and familiar to the vast majority of the phone-buying public.

“Mail is slow and poorly laid out”. As someone who’s been something of a critic of Nokia Messaging since day one, I’m only slowly coming round to relying on it day to day. For Gmail, it’s certainly a lot slower and less functional that the Android dedicated Gmail client, but it’s fairly obvious that this is something of a special case, seeing as Google make both Android and Gmail  – set the iPhone’s Mail client or the generic Android email application to work on another mail system and performance is similar to Mail on the N8, which does at least, through both its Nokia Messaging back-end and through its ‘generic’ IMAP functionality, boast pretty wide compatibility.

It’s true that Mail can be a little slow, especially if set to only grab ‘headers’ rather than full emails – meaning that when you tap on an email you’ve got to wait a few seconds while the body of each message is retrieved. But, once you’ve got it set up as you like it, it’s as usable as any other generic mobile OS email application.

I’ll take slight issue with it being poorly laid out too. Edward first of all shows that Mail on the N8 only shows five emails per screen, compared to the eight on the Samsung’s display. Quite apart from the fact that the latter has a 4″ screen, compared to the N8’s 3.5″, many people (including me) would rather have a larger, clearer font. In this particular case, the Galaxy S’s OLED screen really burns through its battery by sticking to the white Android background and spindly black fonts. The next allegation is that HTML (‘rich text’) emails are displayed as-is, with the Web engine defaulting to a rather small font unless a particular overriding assignment is found within the user’s email. After years of people moaning that email on Symbian meant only seeing plain text, I’m finding it a little ironic that we’re now seeing people moan again now that HTML email is supported. The underlying fault is that the default font used in Web is just a size or two too small – though hopefully this is something that’s trivial to change by Nokia’s programmers.

“Some widgets and applications still bring up a ‘Connect?’ dialog”. It’s true they do. In general, though, this will be (downloaded or bundled, depending on market) third party applications that were originally compiled for Symbian^1, i.e. S60 5th Edition. The core, built-in, N8 applications just go online silently. It’s fair to say that as third party apps and widgets get updated, these extra dialogs should go away completely.

It’s also worth noting that the original intention of all the ‘Connect?’ dialogs – to avoid bill shock from mobile data use – is now a thing of the past, thankfully. On the one hand because of the ubiquity of flat rate, or at least much cheaper, data. And on the other because these days you can go into ‘Connectivity>Settings’ and simply set data to ‘WLAN only’, i.e. you can turn cellular data on and off with a simple software toggle, iOS-style.

“The fonts used in Nokia Social are way too small”. Completely agree – and this is another symptom of the poor default font choice in Web. I’m guessing that whoever signed off on the design for the Social widgets (currently just Twitter and Facebook) was, like me in my walkthrough, looking at the screens in an emulator on a nice large desktop monitor. On the 3.5″ screen off the Nokia N8, the main display fonts are just ridiculously tiny and this issue should have been picked up by the programmers testing the phone in real life.

“Because applications are buried in sub-folders, it takes too many taps to get to them”. This is easy to refute, of course – the whole point of putting little-used utilities and apps in sub-folders is so that you don’t have to scroll through their icons trying to get to something you use a whole lot more. And most reviewers completely miss the fact that Symbian^3, like S60 before it, is completely customisable in this regard and you can ‘Organise’ your app icons however you want. Most S60 owners have ended up with a particular order and hierarchy that’s personal to them and spend five minutes with a new device, shuffling icons around to suit.

More or less the default icon and folder order on the N8 – my first step would be to create a Games folder and shuffle the media apps around, but everyone’s different!

(My thanks to Edward for putting forward his video observations and (hopefully) not minding me replying with some vigour.)

___________

I’ve now been using the Nokia N8 as my main device for two and a half weeks, day in and day out, and I’ve only had two performance concerns:

1. As mentioned above, the Webkit browser engine is a limitation, speed-wise. This is used in email display, Nokia Social, the Ovi Store client, various Webruntime widgets and the main browser. OK, so that’s quite a lot of uses, and quite a few opportunities for slowdowns. It would have been better for half these uses to be catered for with native applications, to be honest (as we’ve said before). The new browser later this year will hopefully also get used by these other modules, bringing greater speed to all.
2. Although Symbian is, as usual, fully multitasking, this doesn’t mean that things don’t need to be fine tuned under the surface. When playing games (where smooth frame rate is essential), I’ve seen significant slowdown when an email sync is taking place in the background. I’d expect a computer with the N8’s specifications to be able to handle doing two things at the same time, especially as email retrieval could be set at quite a low priority in terms of processor resources. Again – hopefully – this will be fixed in an optimised version of Mail in an upcoming firmware.

Neither of these concerns are complete showstoppers, but they should both be high on Nokia’s to-do list to look at. Elsewhere, as mentioned in previous review parts, native and third party applications run quickly, Ovi Maps runs very efficiently, games are smooth, video playback works well – even large music libraries don’t seem to phase the N8.

The N8’s application set

The number of apps and applets shipped with S60 had been growing for years, from the days of the 7650 up to the N95 and N96, over 50 in many cases. S60’s multi-foldered main menu did a good enough job of organising this mass of apps, but it was still a common complaint of many people that some key utilities were buried two levels deep and hard to find.

With the switch to S60 5th Edition and now its new incarnation in Symbian^3, Nokia has made an effort to bundle some of the extra utility functions into the larger main apps – so RealPlayer, Profiles, Themes, App Mgr, About, Speech, Bluetooth, WLan wizard, USB, Settings wizard, Device manager, Phone switch, Sync, Landmarks, Licences and Connection manager have all been subsumed in some way into Settings. This helped quite a bit, but we are still looking at around thirty built-in apps.

It’s with this in mind that I look at the application set in the first launch firmware for the N8 and get tempted to wonder if some of the apps that are missing were omitted in a continuing cull – or whether they simply weren’t working well enough yet on Symbian^3. Probably a mix of the two.

• Internet radio, an Nseries staple, is apparently imminent and will re-appear in the Ovi Store.
• Nokia Podcasting‘s code is more of an issue and we suspect licensing problems are afoot – the latest build of Symbian Podcatcher isn’t quite up to the same standard, but does largely fill the gap.
• Share online is apparently dead in the water, being based in older code, though as already mentioned, the free Pixelpipe Send and Share in the Ovi Store does a better job for more people to an incredibly wide range of online services.
• Converter (for units) is simply missing, which is a little strange, since its code talks to no other apps or services and this would have been trivial in put in and test.
• Location/GPS Data is also missing, which was a shame. Although I never used its position reporting function, it was a handy way to peek at the different signal strengths being received from the various GPS satellites.
• Home media, the interface for UPnP (part of DLNA) is missing in action because the technology is also not in the initial firmware. This will very likely reappear in a firmware update soon.

Quite aside from the omissions mentioned, there have been some new additions to the Symbian application set: Web TV, Photo editor and Video editor (all mentioned at length in part 3 of our review) and Social networking (covered in part 4).

Of note in the standard application set for S60/Symbian are a few items we haven’t covered so far:

• Quickoffice – this is the very latest (v6.2) version of the full Office editing application but supplied with only ‘Viewing’ functionality enabled, which is fair enough. If an N8 user needs to actually edit Word, Excel and Powerpoint files then the full editing version can be bought and unlocked over the air.
• Ovi Maps – this is the latest stable release, v3.4, and includes the revamped homescreen with extra location-specific services. Version 3.6, with multi-touch support, is in beta and should be made available through Sw update on the N8 and other Symbian^3 smartphones imminently.
• Adobe Reader seems to be the latest v2.5 release for S60 5th Edition from the Quickoffice folks and the instance on our review device shows no sign of being a trial version. It opens most PDF files competently and has very flexible zoom options but is never fast and could do with a serious Symbian^3 recompile, incorporating multi-touch.
• Dictionary – both English on its own and with downloadable language pairs, this works (and extends, via the additional languages on the web) very well indeed, as a basic dictionary app that’s always to hand.

Using the N8 after a couple of years with the 5800, N97 and even Samsung i8910 HD, there’s a feeling of some things being done much better but other things having got left behind. Despite the N8’s seeming delay from announcement to availability, the last few months have obviously been somewhat frantic amongst the N8 team’s programmers and some applications got bumped simply because there wasn’t time to get them adapted and approved.

Before passing absolute judgement on the N8’s intended application set, we therefore need to hold fast and wait until the promised PR 2.0 firmware update in the next couple of months – just as we did in term of delivering a verdict with the N97. The difference between the two devices, and the reason we’re able to publish these N8 review parts so quickly, is that the latter has such great hardware resources that there’s no danger of the OS falling over for lack of anything.

Homescreen goodness

The story so far: since 2002, Series 60 phones have had a ‘standby screen’, at first just showing time, date, network and an image, but information was gradually added through 2005/2006/2007, so that everything from application shortcuts to email summary to missed calls to upcoming Calendar appointments could be included in this ‘at a glance’ view. And, on the whole we were – and are – happy.

With the move to larger-screened (touch) devices, starting with the 5800, this standby screen system seemed to be rather wasteful of screen real estate – with 360 by 640 pixels to fill, why not put more graphical information in place? And with the rise and rise of flat rate (or cheap) cellular data, why not put in content that is truly ‘live’, such as social network updates, news headlines and weather?

Why not indeed, and the N97 ‘widgetised homescreen’ was implemented, with up to six slots for shortcuts or widgets of the user’s choice. Around the same time, Android smartphones were just starting to appear with a more flexible, multi-homescreen approach to widgets and the natural evolution of the N97 homescreen was to both put in more ‘swipeable’ screens and also make available a wider range of widgets. This couldn’t be done within the hardware constraints of Nokia’s S60 5th Edition phones, since the homescreen widgets are relatively heavy on RAM – indeed a common tip of mine for N97 owners struggling with always-closing apps was to remove the two default active widgets from the homescreen, instantly releasing another 10MB or so to the OS. The N8, C7 and following devices all have plenty of RAM and this restriction is limited.

Which is where we come to the Symbian^3 homescreen – three separate N97-like panes of active (Internet-connected) and passive (local functionality only) widgets: 18 potential slots for the user to fill and generally make their own. As an example of how a typical N8 user might lay out their homescreen(s), here’s what I’ve done with mine so far. And be gentle with me, it’s a customisation in progress – I’m fiddling each day! I’ve scaled each screen down a little so that I can display all three side by side:

  

How you divide up your homescreens will be a personal thing, of course, but I opted for:

1. a main ‘local’ homescreen – for information and functions on the phone itself. Shown here are Calendar, Music, app shortcuts and favourite contacts – these scroll left and right, i.e. it’s a carousel.
2. an ‘online’ homescreen – bringing in emails, weather, news and feeds from the wider world.
3. a ‘social and sharing’ homescreen – with widgets for Gravity and Pixelpipe Quickpost.

Of particular note is that you can duplicate a widget across multiple homescreens – so for example, you could have time and date, plus Music player control on all three homescreens. You can also have a different backdrop for each homescreen, which helps give character and is another visual clue for which one you’re ‘on’.

In use, the system works quite well, though as usual with Symbian there’s a little set up time needed to get things working just the way you want. For example, RSS/web feed widgets default to updating every four hours, but this is unlikely to be enough – you have to know to go to ‘Web feeds’ in Web and ‘Edit’ each feed to change its update frequency.

Out of the box, there are around 20 widgets included in the launch firmware (including, not shown here, Search, Social, Reuters, Notifications, National Geographic, Movie Teasers, E!, CNN and Wikipedia), but a ‘Store’ button at the top of the ‘Add content’ lists reveals another dozen or so (including AccuWeather, metro, Bloomberg, CNBC News). Which in themselves should be enough for the majority of new users, though there’s a certain elegance to the way you can simply add RSS feeds (‘Web feeds’) and effectively make your own widgets for the site or news source of your choice in just a few seconds (once you know how, admittedly).

 

One oddity of the multiple homescreen system is that, unlike with (for example) Android, the mechanism to switch between them isn’t on a pixel-by-pixel dragging basis. Presumably to keep the touch-recognition within widgets simpler, the homescreens are switched by executing a drag gesture from side to side. Once the gesture’s finished, the homescreen slides over. Contrary to some reviewers’ opinions, this isn’t really ‘lag’ in the sense of the OS being slow, it’s simply that the transition doesn’t start until you’ve finished whatever gesture you were doing, but I can see why the current system is misunderstood and would recommend implementing a pixel-level dragging metaphor in future.

You can also tap on the ‘three dots’ icon to cycle the homescreen to the right, i.e. three taps and you’re back where you started. The ‘lit’ dot shows where you are currently amidst the three. It’s easy enough to understand but would be more intuitive if you could tap the dot that corresponded to the homescreen you wanted – when the number of screens gets (potentially) upped to five or more, you’ll need this kind of extra control.

Contact quick dialler

One feature which has been seen in the dialler screen on only selected Nokia handsets in the past is a quick match on your Contacts database. It sounds like just a small add-on, but in practice is immensely useful, not least because the standard way of searching for a contact in the main application is so clunky (tapping on letters and watching as the letter grid keeps reducing and rearranging – it’s a clever system but inelegant in practice).

The way it works is that you bring up the dialler from the ‘Call’ homescreen shortcut and tap out a few ‘characters’ of a contact or company name using the one-handed predictive T9 keypad. For example, to find Dolly Hamilton in my Contacts list, I might end up typing ‘4264’ (“hami”) and possible matches are instantly shown in a scrollable list. Obviously, the more ‘characters’ you enter, the fewer the number of potential Christian name, surname or company matches and the greater the likelihood that you won’t have to scroll at all.

 

Tapping on a contact name brings up a menu of numbers registered for that person – just tap to dial, etc. Having to use a (shock!) T9-style keypad for entering a few letters of text will yet again annoy reviewers from outside the traditional phone world, but yet again it’s by far the fastest way to enter the contacts dialler search clue, especially while in a hurry and perhaps on the move.

Compatibility and quirks

The majority of S60 5th Edition applications (effectively Symbian^1) should run on the N8 – I only had one which didn’t, Profimail, which then got updated by its developer pretty quickly to fix the issue. It should be noted that some of these applications may bring up Symbian^1-style connection dialogs – a lot depends on how well they were originally written. As more and more developers test on the N8 and its sister devices, we should see even these legacy connection dialogs disappear and third party applications will simply go online silently, as per the components of Symbian^3 itself.

In fact, some S60 3rd Edition applications will also work without modification, again depending on implementation and any hard coded display routines. Java applications, as on S60 5th Edition, are more hit and miss, with even more reliance on developers having tested with this screen size and Java runtime version.

Overall, it’s a good compatibility story though.

Plus Qt 4.6 is built into the launch N8 firmware and, going forwards, Qt will be the developer platform of choice for Symbian, spanning the upcoming compatibility break for Symbian^4, ensuring that applications written in Qt now for the likes of the N8 will also work on the next generation of Symbian hardware. Having said that, the few Qt applications in the Ovi Store for the likes of the X6 and N97 mini haven’t appeared yet in the Ovi Store for the N8, so this Qt capability is so far theoretical.

With Symbian^3 under the hood, the claim was that the old ‘scroll and select’ (single or double tap?) interface paradigm had been totally replaced by a direct interaction paradigm, more in line with other mobile OS of 2010. For all the core OS applications and utilities this is true and it makes everything smoother and simpler, with a long-tap on list items bringing up a context-sensitive menu of options where appropriate.

However, the N8’s application set, as mentioned above, is not just about Symbian^3 itself – there are several licensed applications, none of which seem to have been updated or even recompiled for Symbian^3 and as a result they still show the old ‘double-tap’ uncertainty. Zip manager, Quickoffice and Adobe PDF are the culprits here and at least a re-compile by Epocware and Quickoffice would be appreciated in the near future.

Source : http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/reviews/item/12199_Nokia_N8_part_5-real_world_per.php

Nokia N8 (4)

The good news is that N8’s media handling is one of its strongest suits, with only a few minor caveats, essentially bringing this 2010 Nokia flagship up (arguably) beyond most of the competition. This is where the dedicated Broadcom graphics acceleration chip (GPU) really stretches its legs – in terms of raw benchmarks it’s as capable as the chipsets in any other device on the market, though the question, as always, is how well Nokia has implemented its power.

Video playback

One curiosity of Nokia’s media management has recently been that videos get lumped together with photos in ‘Photos’, the argument presumably being that you’re going to want to view all your media from a recently captured event in the one place. Which is fair enough, though you’d have thought the app should be renamed appropriately. As it is, there’s the usual mix, plus a dedicated Videos application that just err…. shows videos, and in an old-fashioned textual list. I’m not complaining unduly that there’s more than one way to browse videos, but the current setup isn’t exactly elegant.

Both Photos and Videos use a degree of organisation, into ‘Albums’ in the former’s case and between ‘Captured’ and ‘Other clips’ in the latter’s case. And in both, there’s the usual Symbian^3 long-press facility, bringing up a pop-up, contextual menu, for ‘Delete’, ‘Details’, ‘Copy’, ‘Move’, ‘Send’ or ‘Mark’. It’s a lot faster than going down into the ‘Options’ menu every single time. And yes, there’s a ‘Mark multiple’ mode, for going through and choosing several videos to delete, perhaps to save space.

Tapping on a video immediately brings it up full-screen in landscape mode, with the usual playback controls, time bar and volume controls one tap away, plus a ‘Details’ pane available to give you the nitty gritty on bitrate, resolution, encoding, and so on. Interestingly, there’s no mention of ‘Realplayer’ at any point and I’m assuming that the video player in Symbian^3 is brand new and GPU-aware – it’s certainly far more capable in terms of performance than the old Symbian licensed solution.

Quoted video compatibility for the N8 is “3GPP formats (H.263), D-1, Flash Video, H.264/AVC, MPEG-4, RealVideo 10, Sorenson Spark, VC-1, VP6, and WMV 9” – which is hands-down, in my experience, the widest video codec compatibility on any modern phone. The huge (and I mean huge) vagaries of digital video, wherein the ‘container’ file format often has no bearing on the actual content encoded inside and where every encoding method has half a dozen variants and bitrates and resolutions vary wildly, are a subject for another day, but suffice it to say that of the dozen movie trailers I grabbed in AVI, MKV and DivX ‘form’, ten played perfectly, while one of the ones that didn’t turned out to be in full HD format and even my Mac wouldn’t play it properly. Plus my existing collection of thirty or so MP4 and WMV films and music videos all played perfectly.

Subject to picking an appropriate video file (i.e. not stupidly high resolution or some outlandish codec), there’s a very good chance you can just stick it on the N8’s mass memory, memory card or on your USB memory stick via USB-on-the-go, and it will play just fine. And, via HDMI or even ‘standard’ TV out (with the appropriate cables – you get an adapter in the box to get your N8 to accept a full size HDMI lead), also play fine through your living room large-screened TV.

The N8’s specs refer to Dolby Digital Plus Surround Sound, although it’s likely you’ll come across too many suitable sample videos with this embedded at first. Still, maybe there will be movies available to buy with DD+ in the future? There’s an example video included pre-loaded on the N8’s mass memory if you want to test that your HDMI-equipped home cinema system is working, though – or just impress the heck out of your friends!

 

Web TV and Video streaming

New for Nokia’s Symbian^3 range is ‘Web TV’, effectively their latest iteration of Video Centre, bringing in third party video applications and feeds, TV-style. With the N8 only just out, the number of ‘channels’ is a little limited: there’s CNN Video, National Geographic, E! (an entertainment/gossip thing, apparently), Movie Teasers (movie trailers from Paramount), and a ‘Get more’ link to a special ‘Web TV’ section in the Ovi Store, itself containing a number of more specialist channels: ‘Eros Bollywood’, ‘India Today’, ‘Gazetta TV’ and ‘Speed Racer TV’.

Each channel appears, typically, as a side-scrolling ‘Coverflow’-like set of movie thumbnails – just tap to play, although there are some differences in layout and options. Nokia has made the relevant templates available for anyone to create Web TV content and I’d expect quite a few more channels to appear shortly (I’ll be looking at creating aPhones Show channel, for example).

Video is of high quality, with H.264 encoding being standard and with nHD (as on Symbian^1 and Symbian^3) being the minimum resolution.

Our review N8s didn’t have BBC iPlayer pre-installed, but apparently retail units do. In any case, it’s trivial to go to bbc.co.uk/mobile/iplayer/ in Web and access the programmes and downloads that way – these days, iPlayer’s just a bookmark, effectively.

On the whole, Web TV looks more promising and more scalable than any of Nokia’s video centre efforts so far, so let’s hope for the best.

By the way, a curiosity is that there’s no mention of YouTube here – I know that this isn’t ‘TV’ in any real sense, but putting at least a shortcut to this in Web TV would have made sense to me. Instead, YouTube appears as a shortcut at the bottom of the main ‘Videos’ page, linking through to the excellent mobile version of the YouTube web site: videos start playing immediately when their page is loaded, though it’s not obvious that users need to double tap them to bring them up full-screen. Still, once you discover this ‘trick’ then YouTube becomes very workable.

Of additional note is that the Symbian native YouTube client that we’ve had for the last few years doesn’t work fully on Symbian^3 yet – there are login and authentication issues – again let’s hope for a speedy fix and update and I’ll report back in the news.

 

Video editing

Brand new for the N8 is a custom video editor – this is rather impressive, as on-phone video editing goes, and is (in terms of purpose, at any rate) equivalent to the iPhone version of iMovie which iPhone 4 users have to buy as an extra. Photos and videos can be added to a kinetically scrolling storyboard, rearranged as you want, each clip can be cropped to just the frames you want included, titles added, background music added and transition effects inserted. And all of this is quite happy working with full 720p video footage. Is there a catch? Well, yes and no.

For simple, ‘put a load of clips together and show to your friends on the coach on the way home’, the N8 video editor is absolutely fine. But – and it’s something of a big ‘but’, there are two caveats. Firstly, there’s no concept of saving your mini project for later reworking – so you can spend 15 minutes tweaking your movie, save it to a file and watch it – and then there’s no way back into the editor to correct a typo or add an additional scene – you have to start from scratch.

Secondly, although there are transitions, these are implemented very clunkily. Rather than seamlessly merge one video clip into another, the first one is frozen, the first frame grabbed from the following clip, and then the transition is applied to the two still images. After which the second clip is played. Even this would be acceptable if it weren’t for the fact that the audio from each clip is stopped and started suddenly, there’s no concept of fading one out and the other in, let alone merging the two. In practice this caveat produces uncomfortably awkward movies and you’re best off forgetting about ‘transitions’ altogether.

But I’m being a little hard on the tool. It’s working with full 720p video at well over 10Mbps and, importantly, doesn’t reduce the quality of any of the footage in the editing, i.e. there’s no resampling or re-encoding going on. For a fun little video-stitching utility it’s welcome on my N8 – just don’t be under any illusion that you’ll use it for anything serious – and your desktop video editing software isn’t going to be put out of business anytime soon.

 

Photo browsing and display

Photos, mentioned above, is fully multi-touch-enabled, in that you can splay your fingers on an image to zoom in on that point in real time – or pinch to zoom out. In addition, you can obviously drag the photo around while zoomed in, although there’s a weird and intermittent bug where the app gets stuck for a while in multi-touch zoom mode and attempts to drag the photo around get interpreted as extra zoom gestures – here’s hoping this too gets knocked on the head quickly by Nokia in a firmware update.

Zooming performance is good, considering the size of the images (up to 12 megapixels) and the OLED screen does an amazing job at displaying images to their best advantage.

As mentioned in parts 1 and 2 of our N8 review, ‘out of the box’ there’s relatively little you can do (in terms of sharing) with your captured photos – just the option to send them via MMS, email or Bluetooth. Which is fine as far as it goes, but not having a ‘Share online’ facility is a disappointment. As shown in the screenshot, it’s trivial to rectify this by installing the free Pixelpipe Send and Share from the Ovi Store.

Pixelpipe has the disadvantage in that it’s a little more fiddly to set up than Share online, but the huge advantage in that it knows about every media sharing site and network on the planet – and can post to any or all of them in one hit. So, for example, you could be out and about at an event and firing off photos with captions, with Pixelpipe automatically uploading them to Flickr, Twitter and Facebook without you lifting a finger. Again, let’s hope that Nokia has the sense to include Pixelpipe in a future firmware build so that new users don’t have to find the app for themselves!

 

Photo editing

Accessed either from ‘Options | Edit’ in Photos, or through a dedicated Photo editor shortcut, this is an evolution of the existing photo editing in S60 5th Edition phones, itself a port of that in the Nseries phones of the N96 era. Thirteen icons lead to basic edit functions, some of which are new and overhauled compared to what’s gone before.

Here’s what available:

• Rotate, Resize, Crop (as they sound, same as in previous devices)
• Clipart (curiously, a different collection to that previously)
• Fun (a morphing/bending tool, for warping faces and figures)
• Draw (a basic line drawing and pen-painting tool)
• Bubble text, Frame, Red eye (as they sound, same as before)
• Stamp (clip-art-like coloured stamps, only ten currently included)
• Effect (colour styling, art effects and filters, all quite impressive)
• Tuning (auto, vertical/horizontal comparisons, brightness/contrast, highlights/shadows, RGB colour, saturation, sharpness and de-noise)
• Animation (adds thirty or so clip-art like simple ‘fun’ animations)

As usual changes are saved to a new image, so you don’t lose the original.

Even ignoring the trivial/fun additions, the photo editing power on the N8 is seriously useful. The Effect and Tuning panes in particular should impress most users trying to do something more with their new 12 megapixel N8-shot photos.

 

Music playback

Music player has been revamped for Symbian^3, with the home page now a kinetically scrolling list of artists and albums – what most people will want to see first, with the full song list, playlists, genres and ‘podcasts’ now on the Options menu and a tap away. A prominent ‘Shuffle’ legend on this home page acts as a toggle to turn this feature on and off, along with companion menu options in any of the other screens during playback – as you’d expect, random tracks are chosen from your library after each song ends.

The building of the music library still takes a while, as on S60 5th Edition, but with two definite improvements: it seems that this is built-in the background at some point, since when I first went into Music player after inserting my 16GB microSD, all the tracks appeared immediately. Secondly, finding files is a lot quicker – in part due to the faster chip, but also probably due to code optimisation.

Album art remains as enigmatic as ever – there are three completely different schemes for embedding or attaching this and I don’t altogether blame Nokia or Symbian for not supporting my Apple library of iTunes-ripped CDs on my Mac, in terms of handling the iTunes artwork, but would it have been too much to ask for a menu option ‘Get album artwork’ and a link through to the appropriate Gracenote database from within Music player? Now having artwork isn’t a showstopper, but it all looks a bit patchy if your chosen desktop music scheme isn’t one that’s fully supported by Symbian.

 

File decoding compatibility is excellent, as you might expect. The quoted support list is “MP3, WMA, AAC, eAAC, eAAC+, AMR-NB, AMR-WB, E-AC-3, AC-3”, which again encompasses anything you’re likely to come across.

There’s a graphic equaliser built-in, as on previous Nseries, with six presets, including the default ‘flat’ one, though there’s no way to edit a preset or create a new one. Still, music sounds as good on the N8 as it usually does on Nokia’s smartphones and, as ever, I positively love the way that most Nseries ship with a multimedia headset – by which I mean a stereo headset with music playback controls built into the lead. This way I can be out walking or running and change tracks, pause playback or skip an advert simply by pressing the buttons in the ‘pod’ on the lead, rather than having to stop and get my touchscreen N8 out from my pocket and fiddle with that instead.

The headset, a WH-701, is of good quality, too, with in-ear design. You can swap it for a traditional 3.5mm set of headphones of your choice, but you’d lose the ability to take calls from the headset, of course. Another option is to use any stereo Bluetooth headset, but I’ve never been a fan of having my encoded and then decoded MP3 and AAC music getting re-encoded and re-decoded just to make the journey 30 cm from my pocket to my ears…

This being the N8, there’s also a built-in FM transmitter (as on the likes of the N86 and N97) and you can set this to any FM frequency you like – this works brilliantly in the car for getting your music from phone to car speaker system, provided you can find a frequency that’s not used much in your area – I know this can be a potential problem in London and the South East of the UK.

As mentioned in Nokia N8: part 1, overview and hardware, there’s no sign of Nokia’s official Podcasting client in the launch v11 firmware – which is a major shame. I’m assuming that this is a temporary situation (as with Share online?), but in the meantime it’s easy enough to make do with the beta of Symbian Podcatcher (grab the Symbian^1 version until the author fixes the SIS file for the Symbian^3 version….)

Music streaming

You’ll have noted from our news item that Nokia has now released Internet Radio (in the Ovi Store) for their Symbian^1 phones – the timing of this can only mean that a Symbian^3-checked version is imminent for the likes of the N8 and C7 – watch for news of this. In the meantime there are a number of third party streaming radio apps in the Ovi Store, dedicated to a group of stations.

In addition, there’s the Ovi Music client, a Web-based online store for buying and downloading Nokia’s (now DRM-free) music. 30 second samples are available for most tracks and play with one click from the album pages.

 

As with most Nseries handsets from Nokia, there’s an FM radio included too, working using the headphone lead as the main aerial, with a station list downloaded over the air for your area, as determined using your Internet connection. And, as usual, its usefulness depends entirely on where you live and how strong the signals are.

 

Action gaming

One area where the iPhone has reigned supreme since 2008 is gaming – specifically action games, involving 3D movement, real time texture rendering, and so on. Think first person shooters, motor racing, flying games, and so on. Once upon a time, with the N95, Nokia was leading the pack in terms of smartphone graphics, with an onboard graphics coprocessor, but then the chipsets got simplified and, in gaming terms, Nokia’s smartphones got a lot dumber. Just as the iPhone app store’s gaming scene was going stratospheric.

However, with the new Symbian^3 handsets, Nokia has seen the light and copied the Samsung i8910 and Sony Ericsson Vivaz in incorporating a dedicated OpenGL 2.0-compliant graphics processing chip. Those two handsets weren’t big enough sellers to attract games developers, but Nokia’s devices are a different story. The N8 (and C7, C6 and E7) will sell in their tens of millions over the next six months, and the top games developers have come onboard to offer titles that rival some of the top titles on even the iPhone.

For example, GT Racing: Motor Academy HD, which in its scope, feel, graphical intensity and frame rate rival anything else in the world. The circuits are full 3D, complete with gradients and camber and throwing one’s car around is quite an adrenaline rush. Car racing seems to be a strong suit at the moment, with Need for Speed: Shift, Rally Master Pro and Raging Thunder 2, but there are other impressive titles in the Ovi Store (Angry Birds, anyone?) and more being released each week, all of which take advantage of the N8’s graphics power.

On the N8 itself, the presence of a big (16GB) mass memory is welcomed because of the size of these games. With the high resolution graphics needed and with accompanying digital sound, some of the titles mentioned exceed 150MB – with accompanying dire warnings about making sure to download them over Wi-Fi only!

In summary, although a dozen decent games on Symbian^3 doesn’t get close to the hundreds – or even thousands – on the iPhone app store, it’s a good start and shows the potential of these new smartphones.

___________________

The Nokia Nseries has always been centred around multimedia – both creating it and playing it – and the N8 takes multimedia to a new level on the Symbian platform. And arguably on any platform – with the device plugged into an HDMI cinema system, for example, playing back captured and pre-recorded 720p ‘HD’ movies and showing off some of the new generation of Symbian^3 games, I don’t think many observers would be as dismissive of the N8 and Symbian as they might have been a year ago.

In part 4 of this Nokia N8 review Rafe will be looking at Internet connectivity, messaging and email.

Source : http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/reviews/item/12181_Nokia_N8_part_4-multimedia.php

Nokia N8 (3)

As usual, the biggest problem with taking test photos is finding people willing to not only pose for the shots but also to have their mug-shot plastered across All About Symbian, which is why some N8 features are left as text only descriptions. For example, there’s automatic face detection and it works incredibly fast, showing faces in your frame in real time, updated many times a second, with the one that’s going to be used for principal focus framed in green. I’ll mention face detection again later, in the section on the Xenon flash.

My approach here, as on previous in-depth camera phone reviews and comparisons, is to concentrate on the actual detail in the photos, almost all of which isn’t visible in typical web-page-published images. After all, the resolution of these megapixel images is in the many thousands of pixels, horizontally and vertically, while the image you’re seeing on the typical web page has been downsampled to around 700 pixels wide. At which resolution most images will look very similar.

Which is not to say that I’ve in any way ignored issues of colouration and exposure (for example). I’ve included the N8 version of each test image so you can see (and download) for yourself, plus I’ve commented where necessary on any general image issues.

Stills, good light

Let’s start right at the ‘easy’ end – a photo of a brightly coloured scene in mid morning sunlight. Click the photo below to enlarge it or to download the full 12 megapixel original:

It’s an unambitious photo, but still worth analysing. The N8, unsurprisingly, nails this photo perfectly, from the light and shade to the details and colours, even to the colour of the sky.

One thing that intrigued many people, including me, was whether the photo quality would suffer at all in the move to 12mp from the 8mp in the N86. Given identical lens and sensor sizes, I’d say that was likely, but the N8’s sensor is 30% or so bigger than that in the N86, which should nicely compensate for the increase in megapixels – and keep the pixel density similar.

To check results, in line with my chosen detail-centric methodology(!), I took the same scene on the N86 and then blew up a central detail (the side of the truck) by a factor of about 10, so that we can see differences with the naked eye:

The N86’s version is on the left, the N8’s on the right. Aside from the differences in scale and angle, look at the extra consistency and detail in the N8 image: the sunken bolts to the left of the guard on the left side of the crop show the difference most clearly – on the N86 version, they’re almost smudges – on the N8 version, you can make out exactly what they are. In addition, look at the mirror-ball hemispherical trim on the right – the N86 version is over-gaudy and way over-sharpened, while the N8 version shows the trim more or less as the naked eye sees it, up close.

In short, very impressive. Remember that I’m not just comparing the N8’s stills camera to any old 5 megapixel HTC or budget Nokia unit – I just compared its results to the previous imaging pinnacle in the Symbian world – and the N8 bested it with ease.

Let’s take something more challenging – same light conditions, but wide range in subject distance and masses of greenery – traditionally a big failing of Nokia’s JPG encoding algorithms. Here’s the raw photo from the N8 – again, click to enlarge or download:

Let’s pick out a detail that’s interesting – say, the ducks standing on the beam. As with the example above, I took the same scene on the N86 and then blew up this detail (the left hand duck), so that we can see differences more easily:

Again, the N86’s version is on the left, the N8’s on the right. Aside from the differences in scale and angle, the N86’s edge enhancement is very evident – almost every camera in every phone does this, to create images which look like they have more detail than is actually there in real life. The N8 photo, on the other hand, shows no sharpening at all. At first glance the N8 version looks worse as a result, but look again and you should be able to appreciate that you’re seeing the detail that’s actually there rather than what has been put in camera algorithms.

And again I’ll emphasise both that I’m using extreme blow-ups here to make my point and that the N86 was previously top dog in the Symbian camera phone world, not some no-hoper drafted in to make the N8 look good.

Talking of extreme close-ups, let’s zoom in on a smaller detail in the image – the bench beyond the pond – this is a tiny portion of the photo and will expose the raw pixels:

The difference in detail between the N86 image (admittedly this device has a wider angle lens than the N8, but even so…..) and the N8 image is striking. On the left, you can just about make out that the object is a bench. On the right, you can clearly see the individual slats that make up the bench’s back.

Stills, bad light

The previous two examples were taken in good light, with the sun out. What about when it’s overcast and raining (‘typical British holiday weather’)? Here’s the scene – a pub, surrounded by puddles and lit by a miserable grey sky and falling rain:

Again I wanted to compare the N8’s photo against the best of what’s gone before in the Symbian world, from different eras, so I also took the scene with the N82 (5 megapixel images comparable to those on the N95, N95 8GB, N96, N97, X6, and so on, and generally better than most other 5mp camera phones) and N86 8MP (which I was expecting to do very well here, on account of the variable aperture opening wider to let in more light):

From left to right, N82, N86, N8. Particularly notable is the increase in detail as the megapixel count rises, with the sensor sizes also rising, to make sure that digital noise doesn’t become a problem. Look at the posters in the window: on the N82 image, you can just make out several blobs of print; on the N86, you can see an area of text and some kind of image beneath; on the N8 image, you can see that there are three distinct lines of text.

The aforementioned edge enhancement is also present on the N86 image in particular, plus a degree of colour enhancement that looks odd in comparison to the N8’s more natural colours – remember this was a grey and overcast day and I can assure you that the bush in front of the window really wasn’t that green!

Stills, really low light, no flash

Perhaps a slightly artificial category, but surely we’ve all wanted to capture a sunset or moody evening street – or simply a large indoor space, too large for lighting with flash? Here we’re looking for the large sensor in the N8 to produce images with comparatively low digital noise and artefacts, despite the absence of any strong light sources. Click to enlarge or download the 12mp version, etc (and note that the full version has the car’s number plate blacked out, for privacy reasons, hence the re-encoded JPG):

The test shot came out pretty well, though I wanted to give the N8 the ultimate test and put it up against the N86, the low light specialist (variable aperture, and so on), so I took the same scene with that. Here’s a zoomed-in close up for each:

N86 on the left, N8 on the right. Remember that the N86 is the absolute king of low light phone photography – yet you can see from the crops above that the N8 bests it by some margin, with its superior resolution and the largest sensor ever put into a phone showing far more genuine detail in the image. Look at the spare wheel on the car, for example, or the tiles on the porch roof, or even the hatched trim on the lit-up window. Genuinely impressive.

Stills, Flash photography

One of the reasons the N82 was venerated for so long in the Nokia canon was its Xenon flash. See my feature on this, but essentially almost every standalone camera has a Xenon flash, while almost every camera phone has LED flash (or none at all). LED flashes are almost useless for everything but the most amateurish of shots – which is why some manufacturers haven’t even bothered to fit one. In contrast, a Xenon flash is up to 10x brighter (in terms of light energy output) and also lasts for a thousandth the duration, meaning that people and objects get frozen in time and don’t become a blurry, fuzzy mess.

It’s a bit of a mystery (other than build cost) why more smartphones haven’t appeared with Xenon flash over the years. Here’s a typical example, taken in dimly lit room on the N8 (click through etc etc.), raising my glass to toast – note the extreme detail and ‘frozen’ action:

To compare the N8’s Xenon-lit photos with the best of the competition, I tried the same action and pose on the N82 and on the Xenon-flash-equipped Motorola XT720, the only serious current smartphone competitor to Nokia with a Xenon flash:

From left to right, N82, XT720, N8. I was stunned at the difference, once zoomed in like this. The 5-megapixel N82’s shot (which we’d have named the best of the bunch in any other flash photo roundup, I suspect) looks over-exposed and the detail is all fuzzed out by the noise reduction and sharpening. The XT720 does better (at its ‘kludged’ 8 megapixels), with better exposure and clearer detail – but it didn’t quite look in focus. On the right, the N8 nails the shot, with stunning detail – look at the weave of the cloth on the right and at the buttons, plus perfect exposure.

If I had a criticism of the N8’s Xenon capabilities, they would be that the flash is very centre-focussed, i.e. whatever you’re focussing on will be lit perfectly, but that items at the edge of the frame don’t receive enough light. But this is a very minor point.

There’s a slight degree of red-eye removal in ‘auto’ mode, in that there’s a small pre-flash, around a tenth of second before the big one – interestingly, if you explicitly set the flash mode as ‘red eye reduction’, the delay is raised to a second or so, but you get a brighter flash (around 10 to 20% brighter), since the flash unit has had longer to recharge. Thus your tip for the day, if trying to Xenon-shoot an subject that’s more than a few metres away and wanting all the lumens you can get – turn red eye reduction on – even if your subject is a car!

Not tested here but worth noting is an extraordinary degree of intelligence in the N8’s camera algorithms: if the N8 detects a face which is backlit and within the flash range then it will automatically fire the flash as a fill-in. It balances the exposure so you get an extra kick from filling in the shadows and adding a sparkle to the eyes but deliberately doesn’t ‘overcook’ it (making it look like it was obviously shot with flash).

Of course, another data point is needed, so I took the N8 outside and shot my daughter’s bike, at a distance of around 3 metres:

Again, taking the same two Xenon-flash-equipped camera phones, I took the same scene and blew up to roughly 1:1 pixel level, so that we can see differences with the naked eye:

Again, from left to right, N82, XT720 and N8. Interestingly, this comparison is much closer, with the N8’s extra detail being counterbalanced by the slightly brighter Xenon flash in the XT720, which lit up a good metre or so further behind the bike than either of the Nokias. It could be argued that the XT720 photo is a little over-exposed (see the slight loss of detail on the tyre). I’d say the N8 wins this comparison over the Motorola, by a slim margin, but in truth all three Xenon-equipped phones did well here.

In summary, the Xenon unit in the N8 is some 30% smaller than that in the previous Xenon champion, the N82, but still manages, for much of the image frame, to produce equal illumination than the N82. Add in the vastly higher resolution and you can see that the N8 really is superior in this area too. N82 fans may point to the ‘blanket of light’ put out by their favourite candy-bar, but the N8’s shots will be better exposed and with far better detail on the main subjects.

Stills gallery

Some extra N8 stills, some new and some lifted from part 1 of our N8 review:

In summary, you can see that the N8 takes stellar photos with unsurpassed detail – for a camera phone. Although the most impressive thing about the N8’s stills camera is notthe photos it produces. It’s the speed at which it takes them. Focussing, in really good light, takes less than a tenth of a second – in low light, it can extend up to half a second, but the general experience is still much, much better than on any other camera phone I’ve ever used. Even better, having taken a shot (even at the full 12 megapixels), the image appears on screen within a fraction of a second and you can dismiss it just as quickly, ready for the next shot. No doubt the Broadcom graphics chipset is helping out behind the scenes here with the encoding and decoding, but it’s all very, very impressive.

It’s also worth noting, although we may come back to this in a future review part, that the same decode speed is present in the Photos application, for browsing the images (and videos) you’ve captured. On previous S60 5th Edition devices, going into Photos after taking a batch of photos was an exercise in frustration – new users will stab at blank thumbnails and wonder why it wasn’t working, while experienced users would know that the app was trying to build thumbnails and would sit there waiting and waiting… On the N8, Photos display of thumbnails is near instant and it’s actually quite hard to ‘catch it out’, to try and find a blank thumbnail before the N8 has created it.

Video capture

Along with, arguably, Apple with the iPhone 4 and possibly the very latest Samsung top end phones, Nokia has been top of the heap for many years with video capture on its smartphones. From the N93 onwards, the first to capture VGA and digital stereo sound, right up to the N8 (by way of the N82, N95 N95 8GB and N86), there has been an emphasis on quality audio and video capture, with carefully arranged pre-set focus and high depth of field. In good light, there’s a genuine depth of field of 60cm to infinity.

I’ve gone over the pros and cons of the various approaches to video focus in mobile phone cameras before – no focussing and you get blurry subjects; initial focus and you get blurry subjects when the composition changes; continuous auto-focus and you have to wait while focussing gets fixed whenever you change the subject. Simply having great depth of field and letting the user shoot whatever they want without needing any camera knowledge is a very valid solution and it’s easy to see why Nokia keep coming back to it. The only obvious downside is that you can’t film objects which are really close, perhaps pets or other nature subjects (though some enterprising people are already attaching magnifying optics to the N8’s back and proving me wrong!)

On the N8, there’s also the same intelligent digital zoom in video mode as the N86 – this technology seems to be unique to Nokia – the whole 12mp sensor is used for video capture, with downscaling to the desired resolution happening in custom electronics hardware. This means that up to 3x zoom is be handled without any pixellation (there’s a ‘hard’ limit on the N8 at 3x, to stop people trying to zoom further and starting to see degraded results). There are several examples of this intelligent digital zoom in the video montage below, plus our example ‘raw’ MP4s also see Rafe and I being rather fond of playing with the zoom.

There are two ways to utilise this ‘near optical’ (quality) zoom: use the camera-like zoom controls on the N8’s ‘top’ (in camera mode) – this zooms in on the centre of the video frame. Alternatively, double-tapping the screen auto-zooms to 3x immediately, centred on the spot tapped on – though the very act of moving your hand, support and fingers to perform the double-tap usually introduces an element of ‘wobble’ into proceedings.

Having a usable zoom adds enormously to the flexibility of the N8 as a camcorder, though video experts will instantly realise that there’s a corresponding danger. Shaky footage is a risk at the best of times from even experienced phone camera users – add in a 3x zoom and every minute wobble of the device is magnified by 3x as well. If you’re intending to use video capture on the N8 much then I’d highly recommend one of the various camera phone mini-tripods.

Frame rates are specced at 25 frames per second, but averaged over all clips, I found the N8 achieved 24.6 – so clearly there’s a very slight amount of frame drop here and there – not enough to be noticeable to the eye, mind you. Clips are encoded at over 10Mbps in H.264, ensuring maximum picture quality. For those not in the know, 10Mbps is a lot, equivalent to the very highest DVD bit rates. It means that even when panning around, the amount of blurring and artefacts are surprisingly low.

Finally, the sheer size of the N8’s sensor and optics mean that it produces better all round low light video capture than any other camera phone in the world, even taking into account that there’s no LED video light to help out. In low light (e.g. a dim pub), you’ll see elements of digital noise, but the main subject is still eminently watchable. I’ve included a low light clip in the montage below, which also demonstrates some of the other points I’ve just covered:

(you’ll want to click on ‘360p’ and change it to the full ‘720p’ and then maximise the video to full screen by clicking on the right-most icon – and to bear in mind that this is the footageafter both iMovie and YouTube’s compression have been at work)

You’ll have noticed the great sound quality too. Unlike the N93, which had forward facing stereo microphones, the N8 has one facing your subject and one facing towards you, the film-maker. This can produce some interesting effects, though it’s not traditional left/right stereo. In fact, it’s somewhat odd to hear your subject’s audio coming out mainly of the left channel and your own mainly out of the right. The microphones are of Nokia’s usual quality too, full digital, as on the N86 and able to cope with everything from crickets in the bushes to a rock concert without undue audible artefacts or distortions.

Here are two of the clips from the montage, for your interest, this time presented as completely raw .MP4 files so that you can examine each clip’s attributes and quality more carefully.

In terms of competing 720p-shooting camera phones, the best are the iPhone 4 (excellent quality video and audio, manual exposure ‘tapping’ adjustment, tap to re-focus if you change subject) and Samsung Galaxy S (good quality video, acceptable audio, plus continuous auto-focus), but I’d still rather have the N8 – quite simply it’ll produce better video for more people more of the time.

 

Camera – the interface

Having poured superlatives on the N8 in most of the preceding 3000 words, it’s time to rein in my enthusiasm slightly. What would have been nice for the N8’s camera would have been to have had a new, totally reworked interface, something that would make using the camera more of a pleasure. Instead, it’s the same old clunky S60 5th Edition camera application with, seemingly, almost nothing changed – right down to the use of having to double-tap to action dialog items – something which has been banished from the general Symbian^3 interface. But not here.

Moreover there’s the inexcusably clumsy way that the panel of settings (for, among other thing, setting the ‘scene mode’, white balance, exposure…) lets you adjust some parameters but you have to dive into the totally separate UI of the S60 menu to find ‘Settings’ and adjust other parameters. Even little things like auto-hiding the settings panel after selecting your (e.g.) scene mode would have helped. Instead, switching from ‘Auto’ to ‘Close-up’, perhaps the most common camera operation, requires no less than five taps – a major disappointment in view of the work Nokia has put into the hardware.

Will the Camera application be reworked in a future firmware update? I doubt it – it’s very stable, if nothing else, and Nokia won’t want to tamper too much with a module that’s deeply tied into the hardware and already working so well.

To close Camera down, it’s easiest to simply press the N8’s ‘Home’ button – stabbing at the small ‘Exit’ label on the screen is often a lot harder to accomplish. Not having a protective camera glass slider to ‘open’ to launch Camera is a shame – that’s still what makes the N82, N95 and N96 ‘feel’ like cameras, but I do accept Nokia’s explanation about keeping bulk down and keeping the camera available for augmented reality (and other lateral thinking) uses.

 

Supporting applications

The N8 comes with the usual S60 5th Edition image editor and a brand new Video editor, which we’ll cover as part of our look at the N8’s application set in a future review part. Both work well, surprisingly so, in the latter’s case, although as noted in part 1 of this review, the absence of Nokia’s Share online from the N8 means that if you want to upload your new photos or videos then you’re going to have to install the free third party app Pixelpipe Send and Share. Not a problem, Pixelpipe is a true technological marvel, but you have to wonder how many users won’t discover this in the Ovi Store. Not having a built-in video upload to YouTube is going to be the very first thing that is ‘missed’.

Nokia’s solution for ‘sharing’ photos is to use the image uploading built into their new Social suite. Which would be OK if the software didn’t horribly, appallingly, mangle every image in the downscaling from 12 megapixels to 720×540 pixels, barely better than a 2003 VGA photo – what on earth is the point of a 2010 top-spec camera phone being crippled to behave like a 7650 from a previous era? This, surely, can be fixed easily in a Social ‘service update’, as soon as humanly possible?

(amazingly, this is the FULL SIZE photo uploaded by Nokia Social. Hugely disappointing, though easily fixed if Nokia is quick enough?)

In summary

As ever, the story with Nokia’s smartphones is one of superb hardware rather let down by quirky and unfinished software.

Source : http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/reviews/item/12162_Nokia_N8_part_2-camera_and_cam.php

Nokia N8 (2)

Nokia N8 review: Director of photography

Introduction

We’ve come to take Nokia for granted in the low end or the business class but it seems it has lost the knack for killer phones, run out of royal blood. It’s up to the Nseries to fix it all up. The Nokia N8 may just turn out to be the right cure. With that kind of hardware, it’s a smartphone you’d be mad to ignore. For a change we are not talking netbook-grade processing power or loads of RAM. Nokia have instead given their flagship an industry-leading camera and stuff like HDMI port and USB-On-the-Go.

Nokia N8 official photos

The Finnish engineers often like to make a point about Symbian being the most resource-effective OS. We’ve seen it run reasonably fast indeed on even slower CPUs. This time though it’s Symbian ^3, so we’ll have to see it again to believe it.
Key features
Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support
Penta-band 3G with 10.2 Mbps HSDPA and 2 Mbps HSUPA support
Sleek anodized aluminum unibody
3.5″ 16M-color AMOLED capacitive touchscreen of 640 x 360 pixel resolution
12 megapixel autofocus camera with xenon flash and 720p@25fps video recording
Camera features: large 1/1.83” camera sensor, mechanical shutter, ND filter, geo-tagging, face detection
Symbian^3 OS
680 MHz ARM 11 CPU and 256 MB RAM
Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n
microHDMI port for 720p TV-out functionality
GPS receiver with A-GPS support and free lifetime voice-guided navigation
Digital compass
16GB on-board storage, expandable through the microSD card slot
Active noise cancellation with a dedicated mic
DivX and XviD video support
Built-in accelerometer and proximity sensor
Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
Stereo FM Radio with RDS, FM transmitter
microUSB port with USB On-the-go support
Flash and Java support for the web browser
Stereo Bluetooth 3.0
Nice audio reproduction quality
Smart and voice dialing
Scratch resistant Gorilla glass display
Main disadvantages
Symbian^3 is still behind Android and iOS usability standards
No video light
Camera interface is decidedly outdated
Relatively limited 3rd party software availability
No office document editing (without a paid upgrade)
Video player has some issues
Battery life is not on par with best in the business
Battery is not user-replaceable

There’s certainly a lot of pressure on the Nokia N8. People are probably expecting more from it than the very guys who designed it. But the N8 was never meant to compete with the iPhone 4 or the Galaxy S. At least, that’s what Nokia will gladly have you believe.

You see, with the Nokia N8 it’s not about who the competition is. Not about the business benefits of a smartphone, not about the available apps. It’s about the best camera in the business. Now, we’ll have to see about that. Again.

Nokia N8 at ours

The N8 already managed to put a dedicated digicam to shame in our recent blind test. But it will take more than that to get the thumbs up at the end of a full review. The camera is certainly impressive but it’s the overall balance and bang-for-buck that count most in our books here so the N8 better have more aces up its sleeve.

We pop the box open after the break.

Symbian^3 user interface

The Nokia N8 is the pioneer of the new Symbian^3 OS, which according to Nokia should be the first step in the company’s fightback against Android and iOS. We wish it could somehow magically leapfrog the two currently leading platforms but those things just don’t happen overnight.

Of course they might have gone for a total overhaul by starting from scratch as Microsoft did but that would mean losing a lot of functionality and that’s probably the reason Nokia went for the evolutionary, rather than the revolutionary way.

The new OS is certainly not up with the best just yet but is certainly a step in the right direction. The Finnish software engineers finally realized that it’s a streamlined interface that people want and got rid of the whole tap-to-select-another-tap-to-activate non-sense approach that made Symbian^1 so inconsistent.

There are still some traces of that illogical interface in the camera interface, but we are hoping those will be gone soon too.

Here’s a short video demo of the user interface in action.

The new OS also brings some nice UI layout and functionality changes. The homescreen is the most evident of those, its size now expanded to three panes worth of space. You are then free to fill them up with widgets and then rearrange them as you see fit. If three panels are too much for you, you can also delete some of them.

Symbian^3 comes with a new homescreen

You might notice that the homescreen starts scrolling only after you have completed your swipe across the screen but that’s how it was designed and not some lag. Because of the fact that some widgets are side-scrollable the handset waits to see if you want to browse them or skip to the next screen.

The widget catalogue

Still if you want to see immediate response you can scroll through them by clicking the three dot symbol at the bottom of the screen.

The main menu structure is unchanged, retaining the folders format. This comes in contrast to Android, and mostly iOS, where you get a flat menu structure with all icons located on side-scrollable panes. Now you are free to rearrange icons as you see fit so you might go for placing them all in the main folder and get a flat-ish menu system from Symbian^3 too. A list view mode is also available but that involves much more scrolling and that’s why we preferred to leave things in grid.

Not much has changed in the main menu

The task manager has also been changed and now shows screenshots of the running apps, instead of just icons. You also need only a single click to kill them this time.

The refreshed Task manager

The performance of the Symbian has also been taken up a notch with the ^3 version. The Nokia N8 feels snappy most of the time, with lags noticeable only when dealing with heavy apps or when there are a lot of apps running in the background.

And even though heavy multi-taskers will frown at the 256MB of RAM we didn’t get any “Out of memory” errors even when playing the rather demanding NFS Shift game with the camera and the web browser with two tabs open running in background.

Unfortunately the poor text input solution of Symbian^1 has been left unchanged by Symbian^3 and that’s probably our biggest grudge against the new OS (along with the web browser but we’ll come to that later).

We are talking about the virtual QWERTY, which takes you to a new screen to do your text input and gets you back when you’re done typing. That adds an extra step each time you need to do some typing. Not quite the simplicity we all want, is it?

Finally, we have point out that Symbian^3 has introduced quite some eye-candy as opposed to its predecessors. There are icons bumping and revolving, menus being opened with a zoom in and out effects and the occasional fading in and out.

That’s again not quite up with the best, but considering that after some time too much effects become a nuisance we won’t be taking too many points away here.

So generally Symbian^3 is to Android and iOS what the N8 is to their best representatives – a step closer but not quite there. Once again though, considering the pricing we would call it adequate and certainly not a deal breaker.

A solid phonebook

The Nokia N8 comes with a fully functional phonebook, which can easily be synced with your exchange account. Symbian has been offering users virtually unlimited phonebook capacity and excellent contact management for quite some time. Now it is starting to add some social network integration too.

The N8 phonebook is pretty good

Contacts can be freely ordered by first or last name. You can also set whether the contacts from the SIM card, the phone memory and the service numbers will get displayed.

Selecting some of your contacts as favorites moves them to the top of the displayed list. This saves you quite a lot of scrolling.

Marking a contact as favorite moves it on top of the list

Editing a contact offers a great variety of preset fields and you can replicate each of them as many times as you like.

Editing Dexter’s details

You can assign personal ringtones and videos to individual contacts. If you prefer, you may group your contacts and give each group a specific ringtone.

A really nice touch when editing a contact details is the option to enter their address by picking it on a map.

The social network integration includes Facebook and Twitter, which should be fine for the vast majority of users. However you will need to go through an extra step to check out your contact’s status and then another one to see their profile. We agree it might have created a mess if that was all added to the already lengthy phonebook profile but one of those extra steps is probably a bit too much.

Checking out the Silver Surfer Facebook profile through the phonebook
Telephony: smart dial and everything

We didn’t experience any problems with the in-call performance of Nokia N8. Reception levels are good on both ends of calls, the earpiece is loud enough and there were no interferences whatsoever. The built-in secondary microphone is used for active noise-cancellation so calls are loud and clear even in noisy environments.

Voice dialing is available on the N8 and gets activated by pressing and holding the call key on the home screen. It is fully speaker-independent and as far as we can tell performs greatly, recognizing all the names we threw at it.

The N8 comes with pretty well tuned voice dialing

In noisier environments though, its effectiveness might suffer. Also bear in mind that if you have multiple numbers assigned to a contact, the system will dial either the default number or the first in the list.

Smart dialing is also here, practical as ever. You just punch in a few letters from the desired contact’s name and select it from the list that comes up to initiate a call.

You can also use smart dialling

The final option for starting a call is by using one of the widgets available for your homescreen. It allows you to insert your favorite contacts and enter their profiles without going through the phonebook.

You can mute an incoming call by simply flipping the phone over. That same trick also works for snoozing your alarm clock.

Thanks to the proximity sensor the screen turns off automatically when you pick up the phone up to your cheek during a call.

The in-call screen

After we saw how solidly the N8 did in the telephony department, we also put it through its paces in our traditional loudspeaker test. The handset did quite well there too, snatching a Very good mark meaning it should be loud enough for every situation. More info on the test, as well as other results can be found hereSpeakerphone test Voice, dB Pink noise/ Music, dB Ringing phone, dB Overall score
Apple iPhone 4 65.1 60.3 66.2 Below Average
Samsung I9000 Galaxy S 66.6 65.9 66.6 Below Average
Nokia C6 68.0 61.7 77.3 Average
Nokia X6 69.2 66.7 72.5 Good
Nokia N8 75.8 66.2 82.7 Very Good
HTC Desire 76.6 75.7 84.6 Excellent

Messaging department is well covered, save for the keyboard

The Nokia N8 can easily cater for all your messaging needs, but chances are you will find the virtual keyboard rather annoying. It’s not so much the QWERTY keyboard per se as it’s large and comfortable but the fact that it opens in a separate screen with a dedicated text box. Plus there’s no multi-touch support here so very fast typing is bound to lead to more errors than usually.

The Nokia N8 messaging app

And these nuisances are not reserved for the messaging department – it’s the way the keyboards function throughout the whole UI.

The keyboard is probably the worst part of Symbian^3

Back to the essence of messaging, your short messages all arrive in a common inbox. If you like, you can also get them sorted in a threaded manner as conversations.

The Nokia N8 relies on a message editor that is common for all the types of messages. Stuff like a character counter in SMS go without saying.

Sending Dexter a message

If you insert some multimedia content the message is automatically transformed into an MMS. If you type an email address as a recipient, the message turns into an email. In both cases the character counter turns into a data counter showing kilobytes instead of characters.

The Nokia N8 email client allowed us to setup our Gmail account quite easily, while getting it to sync with an Exchange ActiveSync server took a couple of tries. Still in most cases all you will need is to enter is your username and password and you will be good to go in no time.

Multiple email accounts and various security protocols are supported, so you can bet almost any mail service will run trouble-free on your Nokia N8.

Messages can be sorted by various criteria such as date, sender, subject, priority or even by attachments, searching is available as well.

The email client

The client can download headers only or entire messages, and can be set to automatically check mail at a given interval. A nice feature allows you to schedule sending email next time an internet connection is available. This can save you some data traffic charges since you can use the next available WLAN connection instead.

There is also support for attachments, signatures and basically everything you would normally need on a mobile device.

File manager duly covered

Unlike some competing platforms Symbian handsets have always enjoyed a proper file manager. The File manager on board the N8 is a solid app that can basically do anything you can think of with your files – moving, copying renaming, sorting or sending – you name it. You can also password-protect your memory card if you see fit.

You can also search for a specific file or directory. All you need to remember is a part of the desired name and where it was located (phone memory or memory card), the Nokia N8 will find it in no time.

The file manager

With the Nokia N8 and its USB on-the-go support you can also use the file manger to access USB flash drives and even other phones connected over the supplied cable. The N8 successfully handled all the USB flash drives we threw at it but for one, while the handsets that weren’t created by Nokia generally refused to share their memory with the N8.

We tested an Android handset, an iPhone and even a Bada device and they all started charging but wouldn’t connect in mass storage mode. When we plugged the other end of the USB cable in a Nokia E71 though, its memory card immediately popped up in the N8 file manager.
Image gallery is uninspiring

Symbian^3 might have improved a lot of things about the UI but the gallery has not been on the upgrade list. The Nokia N8 comes with virtually the same image browsing software as its predecessors and honestly, it only qualifies as passable by modern standards.

Sure, sweep gestures have been available for a while now and you are also getting pinch-zooming now with the N8 so it’s not all bad but some eye-candy would have been more than welcome.

The N8 image gallery

Also we miss kinetic scrolling and panning, which will cost the N8 a few more points.

On the positive side opting between portrait and landscape mode is automatic, thanks to the built-in accelerometer.

In addition to the familiar pinch gesture you can also zoom in by double taping, the volume rocker or even the on-screen slider.

Zooming in on a single photo

Selection of multiple photos for deleting or sharing is available straight from the gallery. Unfortunately sharing is only available through MMS, email or Bluetooth with no image sharing service integration. We guess that can easily by installing the necessary uploading profiles for the services you’re interested in. At least that’s how it works on non-touch Symbian smartphones.

The final features of the image gallery include the image tagging system for easier image sorting, the slide show and the albums system (again helping you sort your image database).

Overall, picture browsing is relatively fast even with 12 MP pics, but zooming is somewhat slow. You need to wait for a second or two every time you start zooming in on a photo.
Music player got new album art

Symbian never had trouble with the music player functionality but its looks were not quite impressive. With Symbian^3 however Nokia introduces a new Cover Flow-like interface, which adds the much needed eye-candy.

There’s automatic sorting by artist, album, genre and the option to create custom playlists straight from the phone.

The music player got a visual upgrade too

With the huge number of supported formats, available equalizer presets and effects the picture is complete.

Functionality is pretty solid too

Quite naturally, the player can also be minimized to play in background. In this case you can control it through the music player widget on the homescreen, which also indicates the currently running track.
Impressive audio quality

Nokia N8’s multimedia prowess wouldn’t be complete without high quality audio output. Fortunately, the handset managed to deliver on that one too, achieving some excellent scores in our traditional test. And the thing is pretty loud too.

When attached to an active external amplifier (i.e. your car stereo or your home audio system) the Nokia N8 performs greatly with no weak points whatsoever.

There wasn’t much quality deterioration when we plugged in headphones either. Sure, the stereo crosstalk got a bit worse and we recorded some intermodulation distortion but those are rather hard to detect in anything but lab conditions.

And here come the full results so you can see for yourselves:Test Frequency response Noise level Dynamic range THD IMD + Noise Stereo crosstalk
Nokia N8 +0.07 -0.33 -89.9 90.0 0.0059 0.015 -90.9
Nokia N8 (headphones attached) +0.50 -0.18 -89.9 89.9 0.016 0.300 -55.6
Samsung I8700 Omnia 7 +0.13 -1.14 -84.4 85.1 0.017 0.266 -82.5
Samsung I8700 Omnia 7 (headphones attached) +0.31 -0.33 -80.5 81.1 0.016 0.311 -37.7
Samsung I9000 Galaxy S +0.03 -0.04 -90.7 90.6 0.014 0.019 -90.6
Samsung I9000 Galaxy S (headphones attached) +0.40 -0.12 -90.7 90.6 0.018 0.329 -43.3
BlackBerry Torch 9800 +0.20, -3.87 -89.0 87.5 0.0089 0.019 -89.2
BlackBerry Torch 9800 (headphones attached) +0.27, -3.49 -85.7 83.3 0.0088 0.248 -40.4
Apple iPhone 4 +0.01, -0.07 -90.1 90.0 0.0068 0.012 -89.6
Apple iPhone 4 (headphones attached) +0.01, -0.07 -90.4 90.4 0.0036 0.092 -68.4

Nokia N8 frequency response

You can learn more about the whole testing process here.
Impressive video player, but no subtitles

When it comes to video playback on Symbian smartphones, the Nokia N8 turns a new page. It’s the first handset since the Omnia HD to come with DivX and XviD support out of the box but it doesn’t stop here.

The playback was silky smooth on all files with a resolution up to and including 720p, which is quite impressive. Combined with the HDMI port this can easily turn the Nokia N8 into a portable big-screen video player.

Nokia N8 video plyer

The media player app itself only works in fullscreen landscape mode but, since anything else would have made the widescreen display useless, this is understandable. When in fullscreen, a press on the screen shows the controls, which are normally hidden. The amply sized high-contrast screen is also more than welcome for truly enjoying your clips.

Watching a video on the N8

Some restrictions do apply, though. For one the handset cannot play any file that is larger than 2GB and you cannot fast forward and rewind ones larger than 1.5GB. If you manage to keep your files below that limit (which basically excludes full-length 720p HD movies) you will be fine.

The other problem with the video player is the lack of any kind of subtitles support.

Generally the Nokia N8 does impressively on the video playback front but it’s certainly not perfect. Nokia should be able to easily fix all those little shortcomings in some future software updates.
FM radio comes with RDS

The FM radio on Nokia N8 has the same neat and simple interface as on its Symbian^1 predecessors. You can search through the already preset or new stations with sweep gestures or you can use the virtual buttons.

The FM radio app is nice to look at and easy to use

The N8 has RDS support and automatic scanning for an alternative frequency. This means that if you travel, the N8 should be able to take care of auto-switching to the frequencies of your selected radio station.

The RDS is the best part of N8 radio app. The radio station name gets displayed with cool effects across the whole screen, while the rest of the RDS readings are printed in nicely legible text on a line at the bottom.
There’s an FM transmitter here, too

Nokia N8 is among the few phones to come with a built-in FM transmitter. This cool feature allows you to stream the music on your phone to any standard FM radio receiver nearby at a frequency of your choice.

The FM transmitter UI is as simple as it gets

All you need to do is find an unoccupied frequency slot within the standard FM scale between 88.10MHz and 107.90MHz. Finding a position without radio interferences is harder in some places than in other (big cities have quite some radio pollution).

But whatever the case with the available frequencies, the FM transmitter app is simple enough to guarantee smooth and easy operation.

You should also keep the phone and the receiver within close distance or the signal quality quickly deteriorates. In our test we couldn’t afford moving any further than 2 meters away from the receiver but your mileage might vary.

12 megapixel monster of a camera

We’ve now come to the one of the most important parts of the review. The 12 megapixel snapper at the back of the Nokia N8 is one of the main reasons for it to be the most popular handset in our database for the past few months.

Nokia created a lot of hype about the great shots the N8 produces but it also did their homework and packed the device with the largest sensor a mobile phone has seen (stretching to 1/1.83″ inches). The larger sensor surface should benefit its low-light capabilities and dynamic range greatly.

But it doesn’t end there – the Nokia N8 also comes with a mechanical shutter, a powerful xenon flash, a 28mm wide-angle lens and a front glass element made out of hardened glass. The built-in ND filter will compensate for the lack of variable aperture in those extremely bright conditions when you just cannot increase the shooting speed any more.

Unfortunately, this promising cameraphone has a rather uncomfortable and not user-friendly camera interface.

There are only three shortcuts available next to the viewfinder. Those allow you to change between camcorder and still camera, toggle the flash and reveal the rest of the customizable settings.

The user interface is the worst part of the N8 camera

It would have made much more sense if some of those settings were brought on the sides of the viewfinder too as it would have saved us a few clicks, but Nokia engineers didn’t think so. Not to mention that those settings are the only part of the interface where you can still experience the two-taps-to-select nuisance that plagued the previous version of the Symbian touch interface.

On the other hand, the basic functionality is mostly there with the N8 allowing you to adjust white balance, color tone, exposure, ISO, contrast and sharpness. You can also go for one of the preset scene modes and there is an option for creating a custom scene.

Face detection is also available on the Nokia N8, helping you keep the faces in your photos in perfect focus.

Geo-tagging lets you record your current location in the EXIF information of the photos, using the built-in GPS.

In our blind test against Samsung Pixon 12 and Sony Cyber-shot HX5v Nokia N8 won your votes and quite convincingly at that. Unfortunately, we had a streak of really bad weather back then and all the photos were shot in overcast conditions.

This time however we got a few sunny days and decided to make another Nokia N8 vs Samsung Pixon12 shootout.

Nokia N8 • Samsung M8910 Pixon12 • 100% crops

Nokia N8 • Samsung M8910 Pixon12 • 100% crops

Nokia N8 • Samsung M8910 Pixon12 • 100% crops

Nokia N8 • Samsung M8910 Pixon12 • 100% crops

Nokia N8 • Samsung M8910 Pixon12 • 100% crops

Nokia N8 • Samsung M8910 Pixon12 • 100% crops

Nokia N8 • Samsung M8910 Pixon12 • 100% crops

Nokia N8 • Samsung M8910 Pixon12 • 100% crops

Nokia N8 • Samsung M8910 Pixon12 • 100% crops

Nokia N8 • Samsung M8910 Pixon12 • 100% crops

The first thing that impressed us about the Nokia N8 is its optical quality. This is not the first time we see a Carl Zeiss-certified lens on a mobile phone, but this one delivered an absolutely stellar performance. None of the dozens of camera samples we shot had any purple fringing, or any barrel distortion (which is quite badly pronounced on the Pixon12) or any other flaw whatsoever.

The amount of resolved detail is also very impressive with no noticable degradation towards the frame borders. If we had to be extremely picky we’d point the slight softness in the extreme corners but that’s stretching it really.

The Nokia N8 levels of resolved detail are impressive even for a 12 megapixel camera and we are not talking cameraphones only.

What we especially like about the images produced the N8 camera is the laidback approach to the processing – the bigger sensor simply doesn’t need excessive sharpening, edge enhancement or aggressive noise suppression to produce pleasing images. And that’s why the N8 lets you enjoy the natural look of the images.

The sensor size has also blessed the Nokia N8 images with much better dynamic range than its competitors. You can see that on several occasions in the shootout the Nokia N8 managed to retain all the detail in the highlight areas, where one or more of the color channels of its competitor have clipped.

Low-light photography

The other area where the big sensor counts big time is low light performance. The Nokia N8 lived up to our high expectations here and produced some really impressive shots at ISO 400 and ISO 800. Sure, there is some noise, but the sparing noise suppression has left most of the details intact. In contrast, on the Pixon 12 samples almost all the fine detail is lost because of the aggressive noise suppressing routines

Nokia N8 • Samsung M8910 Pixon12

Nokia N8 • Samsung M8910 Pixon12

Mind you, in low light conditions with the flash disabled the Nokia N8 tends to chose quite low shutter speeds (as low as 1/8sec). At that kind of speed it’s almost impossible to make a photo without camera shake unless you use a tripod or other support for the handset. If you don’t have those at hand we’d suggest that you crank the ISO setting higher.

Flash photography

Or you could just turn the on-board xenon flash on if your subjects are close enough. Let’s see how that turns out.

Nokia N8 • Samsung M8910 Pixon12 • Sony DSC-HX5v

The Nokia N8 comes with a 30% smaller flash module than the Nokia N82, but Nokia engineers claim that the flash output is the same. Still, the Samsung Pixon12 has an obviously more capable unit – calculations suggest it’s up to 30% more powerful.

However the Nokia N8 excellent high ISO performance compensates for the lower flash range. The Nokia N8 goes for a higher ISO setting so that it achieves the same exposure as the Pixon12 with less light coming from the flash.

The flash samples above prove our point. In this flash scene the Nokia N8 selected ISO 383, while the Pixon12 chose ISO 160, while the Sony HX5 went for ISO 200.

Despite the large ISO difference the Nokia N8 produces a slightly inferior image but it loses by a very small margin and that says a lot on its own.

What bothers us slightly more is the bluish cast that most N8 flash shots get, meaning there’s something wrong with the automatic white balance setup.

According to Nokia engineers, one way to get a slightly greater flash range out of the N8 is to use the red-eye reduction mode. Reportedly, this provides around 10-20% more flash power. The team back at Nokia is hard at work on tweaking some settings so that a future software update can bring the improved flash performance to all flash modes, not just the red-eye removal mode.

Macro photography

The Macro mode on the Nokia N8 is accessible from the Scenes menu. It’s called Close-up but the truth is you can’t go as close to your subject as with some other handsets. Best case scenario your frame will cover about 13 cm horizontally. The quality of the shots remains great as usual.

Nokia N8 macro sample
Final verdict

It’s obviously time for the Samsung Pixon12 to give up its cameraphone crown. The little fella managed to hold onto it for more than a year by using a lot smaller 1/2.5″ sensor, which is an impressive achievement on its own. Now however it should make way for the new cameraphone king.

More Nokia N8 camera samples

With great dynamic range and excellent low-light performance, lots of resolved detail, geometrically perfect lens and, pleasant, but not overdone colors, the Finnish flagship leaves no doubt as to whether it is worthy of the crown. The only issues we can point out with the camera are the inconvenient user interface and the uninspiring flash photography results.

720p Video recording

With the still camera champion title already in the bag, the Nokia N8 is going to give a try and claim the camcorder cup too. It can capture 720p (1280×720 pixels) videos at 25 frames per second, which sounds like good base for success.

Sure, you have every right to argue that 720p@30 fps is better, but you should also remember that big-screen movies are shot at 24 fps and no one complains about that. Plus it’s quite important to note that Nokia N8 is able to maintain its framerate even in very dynamic situations so you won’t see much jerkiness here.

The camcorder UI

Yet if we had to pick one feature that sets the Nokia N8 videos apart and gives it quite an edge against the competition it’d be the 3x digital zoom. Unlike its competitors the N8 uses the full resolution of the 12MP sensor and retains the HD quality even at full zoom. Digital zoom might make no sense in still imaging, but it works great on video and it’s great someone has finally made good use of it.

We tested the Nokia N8 digital zoom extensively and we can safely conclude that it works exactly as promised, except in really low light environments, where zooming results in increased noise levels.

With the optical zoom modules too thick for the modern cameraphones this looks like the way to go. The only bad thing we can say about the feature is that it doesn’t work as good in the range of 1x-2x, because of the limitations of the Nokia N8 12MP sensor. You can check our Nokia N8 preview for a demonstration and detailed explanation of the issue.

Another quite unique feature of the video recorder in Nokia N8 is the stereo audio recording. It uses the second, noise cancellation microphone and records excellent stereo sound to go with the sweet footage.

To give you a proper idea of the quality of the videos recorded with the Nokia N8 we prepared two brief shootout videos. The first one puts the N8 head-to-head with the Samsung S8500 Wave, which sports one of the best HD camcorders among cameraphones.

Update 19 Oct: The framerate of the Wave videos is 29.97 fps, while the Nokia N8 records at 25 fps. When we originally published the review we had the N8 recording converted to 29.97fps but since that put it in somewhat disadvantageous position, we decided to go the opposite way.

We converted the Wave videos down to 25fps. That makes those slightly jerky, but again don’t compare framerates and try to focus on the image quality and the exposure shifts instead. Also bear in mind that the YouTube compression has added some additional artifacts, which don’t exist in the original videos.
Nokia N8 has a wider field of view, so it fits more in the frame and of course the objects look smaller. Regardless, you can easily tell that it offers better resolution and a lot better dynamic range. The colors are a matter of personal preference, but we tend to like the N8 approach a tad better.

Here is the second comparison, this time with Apple iPhone 4. Again, we’ve converted the iPhone4 videos to 25fps so hence the jerkiness. IT IS NOT the iPhone’s real-life performance. Make sure you focus your attention on image quality, dynamic range and exposure shifts instead.

The difference in the field of view is even bigger this time, so the objects in the iPhone 4 half are a lot bigger and the resolution comparison is harder. Fortunately, we have already tested the video resolution in our preview and concluded that iPhone 4 has the upper hand there.

However, there is a lot more than resolution when we talk about video. The colors in Nokia N8 are a lot more natural, while the oversaturated output of Apple iPhone 4 might look good in a dull weather, but creates all kinds of problems with subjects, which are already colorful. The effect puts an unnatural yellow cast over all subjects and the objects that are already yellow to begin with are often overexposed. The sky suffers as well – with the blues coming out rather unnatural.

Next up, the Nokia N8 has a much better dynamic range – there are almost no overexposed areas in the above movie. In the iPhone 4 samples on the other hand, overexposure is a common issue.

There is one more thing we want to point out in this sample. Look at how the two cameraphones react to the rapidly changing scene in the beginning (sorry for the mad panning, but we had to make a point there). You can clearly see the iPhone 4 reacts a bit slower than the N8 followed by a jerky exposure changes that don’t look so good. The Nokia N8 on the other hand does the exposure compensation so smoothly that you can hardly see it move.

The N8 video recording is not withot its flaws too. As you may already know, the Nokia N8 doesn’t use autofocus in video recording. Instead, the Finns chose to use something they call Active Hyper Focal Distance system. In theory, it should allow for videos that have everything in focus from front to back – as long as the subject you’re shooting is more than 60 cm away from the camera.

Our tests however showed that perfect focus ranges from 1m to infinity and this does make a difference, especially with a wide-angle lens like this one. To see the downsides of this approach, we’ve prepared another video sample.

In the beginning, the performer is not really tack sharp. We can easily prove this with a quick jump to the maximum digital magnification the camera offers. Towards the end of the video we take a step back and presto, the performer gets really sharp.

Of course that same top-notch digital zooming method is the workaround for the longer minimum focus distance. You should simply zoom in on your subject instead of going closer. It sounds quite logical, but it needs getting used to. We would have liked it better if Nokia gave us some way of autofocusing. It doesn’t have to be continuous autofocus for the entire video – it can just as well auto focus before you start recording.

Generally we are very pleased with the Nokia N8 video recording capabilities. The clever, HD quality retaining digital zoom alone was enough to impress us but the N8 didn’t stop there. The resolution it offers is high and the dynamic range is just great. The dynamic adjustment to drastic scene changes is fast, but unobtrusive – simply the best we’ve seen on a mobile. If there were an option for auto or touch focus it could have been perfect.

And here’s a 720p video sample from our new test setup. Pay attention to the second half of the video where we lower the light to show you how the the camcorder performs in more challenging conditions.
Video quality comparison

The Nokia N8 was also included in our Video Compare Tool database. Check it out – the tool’s page includes a quick walkthrough on how to use it and what to look for.

Nokia N8 in the Video Compare Tool

All round connectivity

Excellent all-around connectivity is the norm with even mid-range smartphones these days so Nokia N8 would have no excuses if it failed to provide in this department. Fortunately, this is not the case as the Finnish flagship offers every data transfer option you would need and then some more.

For starters, all kinds of network connectivity options are at your disposal – GPRS, EDGE and 3G with HSPA (10.2 Mbps HSDPA and 2.0 Mbps HSUPA). The GSM/EDGE networking comes in quad-band flavor and the 3G covers all the five bands available worldwide – 850/900/1700/1900/2100 MHz. We don’t think we’ve reviewed a penta-band phone before.

The USB is version 2.0, with the standard microUSB port capable of charging the phones besides transferring data. We already covered the USB on-the-go functionality, but just for the record, we had almost 100% success of attaching USB flash drives and other Nokia phones as slave storages, but that’s about it. The Nokia N8 didn’t connect to card readers and phones by other brands.

Bluetooth connectivity is version 3.0 and naturally there’s A2DP stereo Bluetooth support.

The Wi-Fi antenna has support for WirelessN.

Then there’s the microSD card slot which can be used for transferring data to and from your N8. However both the memory card and the internal memory are accessible when you connect the handset to a computer in Mass storage mode and we managed to get speeds north of 10 MB/s when transferring data this way. That means you’d hardly ever need to use an external card reader .

Finally, there’s the microHDMI port that can output up to 720p video with multi-channel audio (as long as the video source has that). There’s even the right type of cable adapter supplied in the retail package.

All you need is a regular HDMI cable that plugs in the adapter on one side and in the HDTV on the other side.

Your handset will immediately start streaming a copy of its display to your TV. You do the controlling from the N8 itself, except for the volume, which is now for the TV to manage.

If you plan on showing your friends some of those 12 megapixel photos you took with the N8 camera on the HDTV, you should know that zooming in isn’t possible straight from the gallery.

You can still zoom in as much as you want, but you will have to go to the image editor (by clicking options and then edit) and use the zooming controls there. We can’t quite see the logic behind that though – zooming in from the gallery itself would have been a much more comfortable solution.
Web browser is rather disappointing

Unfortunately, Symbian^3 didn’t deliver the browser overhaul that the platform needs desperately. Despite the added multi-touch and FlashLite 4.0 support the N8 can just watch helplessly as the Android Froyo speeds away.

The Symbian^3 web browser is functional but its UI needs polishing

Starting with the good things, the Nokia N8 browser has a good rendering algorithm and offers some nice functionality such as different font sizes (5 options), auto fill-in of web forms and a password manager.

The Flash Lite 4.0 support is even enough for playing flash videos, but it’s not quite as impressive a performer as the desktop-grade Adobe Flash 10.1 for Android Froyo. You can also choose to switch Flash off to cut down on loading times and save some data traffic.

Going landscape • the context menu

The Find on page feature allows you search for keywords. The visual history is a nice bonus that can help you find a page you’ve visited more easily. There’s also a popup blocker.

The web browser supports tabs but there is no other way of opening a new tab but to click on a pop-up link. We’d have really preferred to see an option to open links in new window.

Double tapping any text zooms it in on screen, but again, the text doesn’t auto fit to the smaller viewport and you still need to scroll sideways.

Digging deeper into the settings menu

One of the worst parts of the N8 web browser is entering a web address, which can take up to four steps, while most competing platforms do it with one – hell, some even do it with voice commands.

So, generally speaking, the Symbian^3 browser is hardly a better copy of its S60 predecessor and that should certainly cost the N8 some points. Internet browsing has never been more popular and until Nokia did something about the usability of their browser, their smartphones will be getting quite a lot of stick for it.

If we could give you an advice here, we’d say get the latest Opera Mobile up and running on you N8 and use the default browser only when you need to access Flash content. The hassle of using two apps for the same purpose is still better than having to deal with the S^3 web browser shortcomings.
Organizer all set

Symbian^1 used to have a pretty decent organizer already so all Nokia needed to do is tune it up a bit and slightly polish the touch experience. And that’s exactly what they did – by taking the same streamlined approach as with the rest of the interface.

The calendar has four different view modes – monthly, weekly, daily and a to-do list, which allows you to check all your To-Do entries regardless of their date. There are three types of events available for setting up – Meeting, Anniversary and To-do. Each event has some specific fields of its own, and some of them allow an alarm to be activated at a preset time to act as a reminder.

The calendar has seen some further touch optimization

The Nokia N8 also allows you to browser office documents thanks to the preinstalled Quickoffice application. The Adobe PDF reader is also here to take care of those .PDF files, while the ZIP manager allows you to deal with digital archives on the go.

Quickoffice is here but editing costs extra

Unfortunately the Quickoffice version preinstalled doesn’t support editing, but we doubt much of the N8 target audience will need it anyway. Still if you insist, you can purchase the paid update and enable edit mode.

There’s also a PDF reader and a ZIP manager on board

The calculator application is very familiar but it lacks the functionality of some of its competitors. The square root is the most complicated function it handles and this is no longer considered an achievement. If all you do with it is split the bill at the bar though, you’re free to disregard that last sentence.

The calculator is hardly the most functional around

The organizer package also includes a dictionary, voice recorder, as well as the Notes application. The good unit converter we’ve come to know from Symbian^1 is strangely gone but you can grab one yourselves from the Ovi store.

The dictionary, the voice recorder and the notes app continue the organizer marathon

The alarm application allows you to set up as many alarms as you want, each with its own name, trigger day and repeat pattern. As we already mentioned, thanks to the built-in accelerometer you can also snooze the alarm by simply flipping your phone.

You can set an unlimited number of alarms on the N8
Ovi Maps 3.04 gives you free lifetime navigation

The Nokia N8 comes with a built-in GPS receiver, which managed to get a satellite lock from a cold start in just over two minutes (A-GPS turned off). Keeping the lock from then on was not an issue for the N8 even in a relatively dense urban environment.

As you probably know since the start of the year Nokia made their Ovi Maps navigation free for all their smartphones, which naturally includes the N8 flagship. The voice guidance is currently available in over 70 countries and over 40 different languages, with even traffic information for more than 10 of those.

In addition, Nokia did a pretty decent job with Ovi Maps application itself, blessing it with a cool, touch-friendly interface, as well as nice features such as the Lonely planet city guide, HRS hotels and the Michelin restaurant guide. There’s also an events guide that lists all events happening within a 3km range of your position and provides you with details on each one.

With Ovi Maps 3.04 you get three different view modes including satellite and terrain maps. Those however do need an internet connection. The more regular 2D and 3D view modes are also at hand and can be used with preloaded maps.

Ovi Maps gives you free lifetime voice-guided navigation over the excellent Navteq maps

The route planning algorithm is also rather easy to customize to best suit your preferences. Toll roads and motorways can be avoided and so can tunnels and ferries. Route selection can be set to either fastest or shortest.

Ovi Maps is also usable for pedestrian navigation or you can switch the GPS receiver off and use the phone as a hand-held map.
Ovi Store got an UI refresh

Symbian is still the best selling smartphone OS worldwide, but you won’t be able to tell that just by browsing the application repositories for the different platforms. The Ovi store is way behind the Android Market, let alone the market-leading App Store.

Yet there are signs recently that Nokia has finally realized how important apps are to a modern smartphone user. The company has refreshed their Ovi store interface to make it more user-friendly and it is finally making some serious effort to attract more developers. With a user-base as big as its we are more than certain that it will have success with these efforts.

Ovi store UI got refreshed

There are already a few thousand apps there and chances are that the most important apps will be there soon enough. Catching up with the best won’t be easy even if their growth slowed down and currently, there are no signs of a similar trend.

You can browse the apps available in the Ovi Store by categories – Applications, Games, Audio and Video content, Personalization; or by collections – Go Green, Tools for Professionals, Homescreen Apps, Highly Addictive Games and Web TV.

The number of apps is increasing too

Your account profile keeps record of all the apps you have installed under My stuff. You can now also select where games and apps should be installed and where audio and video should go. That’s nice – we wish Android had that right from the start.

Final words

The Nokia N8 is the best Nokia has to offer. A few years back thousands of people would take this to mean the best on the market. Things are not that simple today and Nokia has been learning it the hard way. But the company has been learning.

It’s been a long losing streak for Nokia in the game of touch phones. You can’t expect it to suddenly turn the game around and start beating the snot out of the competition. It makes much more sense to try and be better one step at a time. The best camera in business is one such step.

We’ve given up looking for the ultimate smartphone, haven’t we? The Nokia N8 most certainly isn’t in contention there. And Symbian ^3 is not the best touchscreen experience you can get – although what’s fair is fair – it’s an improvement over S60 5th. And the Ovi store isn’t the best app market, but the guys behind it try really hard.

Symbian sucks on touchscreen – yeah, but there are some nice multimedia features. The web browser is not that good – yeah, but you get USB-on-the-go. There are better screens out there – but no better cameras. Not necessarily in this order.

The Nokia N8 seems capable of sustaining balance. In one particular area, it’s the unquestioned winner. Elsewhere, it’s just fair – there are ups and downs all along its spec sheet. As always, it boils down to picking your priorities.

Now let’s take a look at the competition to put things in perspective.

The Samsung S8500 Wave wins a few points against the N8 on pricing and comes with a much better (though slightly smaller) display. The Bada OS offers better touch experience than Symbian^3. Again, it’s the camera that helps the N8 strike back and this time it even has the apps count in its favor. Not to mention that unlike Samsung’s Bada phone, the Symbian smartphone has a very decent and free SatNav solution in the face of Nokia maps.

Samsung S8500 Wave

The Motorola MILESTONE XT720 is the best full-touch cameraphone that the American company has to offer and the N8 won’t avoid comparisons to that one either. The Milestone matches the HDMI capabilities of the Nokia and offers a superior screen (though no AMOLED). Unfortunately, the MILESTONE XT720 is not as impressive as the N8 in terms of image and mostly video quality. Not to mention the rather limited system storage for installing third-party apps. This is a really serious drawback for any Android smartphone that doesn’t use the latest Android OS ver 2.2.

Motorola MILESTONE XT720

You might also want to consider the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 as a potential alternative to the Nokia N8. With a larger and higher res-screen it also packs a very decent camera (though no HD video, at least for now) so it’s a viable option if you’re shopping for a smart cameraphone. It’s still Android 1.6 though and the XPERIA X10 is more expensive and there’s no HDMI or DivX/Xvid support on that one either.

Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10

So with free lifetime navigation, some great multimedia features, impressive build quality and little (but important) perks like USB-on-the-go and HDMI, the Nokia N8 can stand its ground against the competition. It’s also only just about starting and Nokia has a reputation for delivering major software updates to its smartphones on a regular basis.

The combination of all the things above is a unique selling point on its own, but it’s the camera that puts the Nokia N8 in a class of its own and changes the nature of the competition altogether. The ultimate cameraphone will always be compared to the best in business.

The N8 puts the Nseries back to the top where it belongs. Nokia can be proud but they must know it’s just the beginning. Right now they have a winning cameraphone set in pole position. It will be a while before they have one phone to rule them all, if ever.

Source : http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_n8-review-523p9.php

Nokia N8

Every once in a while, we get to review a sea-change device here on All About Symbian. There was the first S60 3rd Edition phone – the Nokia N80, there was the famous N95, the first to run S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1 and with every bell and whistle then known to man onboard, there was the 5800, the first S60 5th Edition touch-driven phone running on Symbian OS. In each case, tackling a review was somewhat daunting, since there’s so much that’s new. Quite literally, where do you start?

At the end, funnily enough. We now have the final retail package and device, with launch firmware, so let’s summarise the Nokia N8 in a single sentence.

The Nokia N8, along with Symbian^3 under the hood, fixes most of what was annoying about all of Nokia’s previous S60 5th Edition phones, brings multimedia in line with the Android and iOS smartphones, and has the added bonus of super hardware and the hands-down best camera and camcorder ever put into a phone.

That summary sentence said, the N8’s by no means perfect – the non-replaceable 1200mAh battery (unless you’re handy with a Torx screwdriver and have read the instructions) means saying goodbye to the traditional Nokia flexibility of being able to carry a spare for emergencies. As a result, really heavy users will need to carry a mains or mobile charger instead and top-up when needed. I’ll report back on the actual battery life achieved per charge after I’ve used it day in and day out for a week or two – Symbian^3 and the new chipset do promise better overall battery life and, in my testing so far, this is borne out.

Slightly worrying, especially in view of the camera pretensions, is that the 12 megapixel camera glass is both relatively exposed and unprotected by a mechanical protector. The exterior glass is ‘toughened’ (one of Nokia PR’s proto N8s had seen regular use every day for 3 months and the glass was still pristine), but fingerprints/grease/dust will still cause problems, especially when shooting with the Xenon flash or into the sun outdoors. Having to wipe the glass of fingerprint grease before every important photo or video is a bit of a pain.

Finally, it’s true that some aspects of Symbian^3 and its implementation are less intuitive and useful than the best of the competition. I’m thinking of the legacy ‘left/right’ function panels in many applications, the mishmash of font sizes used in some built-in applications (e.g. Nokia Social) and of the lack of multi-touch support in the on-screen qwerty keyboard – almost four years after the iPhone was announced, Symbian really should have caught up in this area by now. (There is word correction (and optional auto-completion) and this gets better and better as it learns your vocabulary, but without multi-touch you have to slow your input down to lift each finger before the next one hits somwhere else on the virtual keyboard. More on this in part 4 of our review, looking at the N8’s interface in general.)

But let’s not dwell on the negatives, there’s simply so much that’s positive about the N8 that really is worth shouting about.

We’ll be talking about where the N8 fits into the increasingly competitive smartphone landscape of 2010 later, but for now let’s look at it from the specific perspective of a generation of All About Symbian readers used to the likes of the Nokia 5800, N97, N97 mini and even X6:

RAM has been doubled, free RAM almost tripled. 128MB of RAM seemed enough when the likes of the 5800 and N97 were conceived, but (predictably) the OS and applications ‘ran away’ in terms of resource requirements and most S60 5th Edition users will have hit RAM ‘memory’ limits regularly. With 256MB onboard (and following the Samsung i8910 and Sony Ericsson Satio/Vivaz), there’s plenty of free RAM for the running OS and applications. It has been argued that even the current 135MB of free RAM in the N8 may not be enough over the whole of the device’s lifetime, but its fair to say that it’s got a far better chance than the 5800 and N97 had, plus there’s the added benefit of ‘writeable demand paging’, effectively virtual memory for the OS.

Larger system disk. As with the N97 mini, C6-00 and X6, Nokia has learnt its lesson here and is shipping the N8 with a 512MB ‘system’ (C:) disk, of which around 185MB is free when the device is first started. With many Nokia applications insisting on installing to disk C:, this sort of space is essential. The N8 also has a 16GB mass memory disk (of which around 14.5GB is available after purchase, partly because of sample content and partly due to the ‘virtual memory’/’writeable demand paging’ system used in Symbian^3), but this is, as usual, seen as disk E: (the microSD card – should you insert one – is disk F:)

Responsive touchscreen, using capacitive technology. Apart from the 3.2″-screened X6, the N8 is Nokia’s first capacitive touch-driven smartphone. As I discussed in detail here, user interface expectations are now such that capacitive touch is a must. The N8’s toughened glass screen offers both better mechanical protection and ‘instant’ response to a user’s touch, with no reliance on a specific finger pressure. The downsides of capacitive technology apply (such as having to use a finger and not a stylus), but aren’t really an issue for most people. As a bonus, multi-touch (first seen on the iPhone) is also implemented in a few select applications – of which more in a future review part.

Streamlined UI. As mentioned before on AAS, Symbian^3 has done away with the old ‘scroll and select’ UI inherited from d-pad-driven phones. On the N8, tapping an on-screen button, icon or option does something – there’s no ‘tap and wonder whether another tap is needed’. Where there are multiple things that you might want to do to an item (e.g. in a list), a long tap is now handled and is analagous to right clicking something in a desktop OS.

Pentaband. There’s none of this ‘European version, APAC version, USA version’ nonsense. The N8 supports HSDPA 850/900/1700/1900/2100 out of the box, which should mean that this one phone will work at 3G (and 3.5G) speeds across most of the world.

Graphics acceleration. You only have to try and play high bitrate/resolution videos on the previous generation of Nokia’s Symbian hardware to see that the phone’s main processor was often worked so hard that it started to falter. And you could forget action games, there simply wasn’t enough oomph under the bonnet – you’ll remember my empassioned plea for Nokia to re-introduce hardware graphics acceleration? The N8, along with its sister devices in Nokia’s Symbian^3 range, has full ‘2D/3D Graphics acceleration’ (ref), meaning that videos decode easily and play smoothly, transitions animate without hiccups and action games become possible. Rally Master Pro (in the Ovi Store) seems optimised for the new platform and frame rates are silky smooth.

Three homescreens. You may think this a trivial addition – or, indeed, think it’s not enough (if you’re coming from, say, Android) – but, now that the idea of having widgetised homescreens is established, it makes sense to have space for more than six widgets. The idea here is to side swipe to switch screens, perhaps reserving one for media widgets, one for business things and one for shortcuts – or however you want to try organising things. Side swiping is smoothy implemented, again thanks to that capacitive touchscreen. One nice touch is that each homescreen can have its own wallpaper, for added atmosphere and distinction.

Better use of screen real estate. As mentioned above, on the S60 5th Edition phones, there are large left and right ‘function’/soft keys at the bottom of each screen – or worse, in landscape mode, on the right and using up far too much room in many applications. Symbian^3 on the N8 reduces the space taken in landscape mode but the old left/right function key metaphor is still used, both in portrait and landscape mode in most cases. This is something of a waste of screen space still and has apparently been preserved to help upgraders feel familiar with the user interface. With the change in UI for Symbian^4, future devices are expected to ditch these vestigial panels completely, though we’re stuck with them for the N8. In use, they’re rarely an issue however.

In addition to the improvements just noted, there’s a distinct step-up in build quality. The N8 is essentially a unibody aluminium design (in a number of possible colours – “Dark Grey, Silver White, Green, Blue, Orange”, with doubtless more to follow – a byproduct of the anodising process for the metal), measuring 113 x 59 x 13mm and weighing 135g. Nokia has demonstrated the ‘scratch resistance’ of the aluminium several times – together with the toughened glass on the display, it’s fair to say that the N8 should come through day to day scrapes without incident.

Screen size is an interesting issue on the N8. The 3.5″ AMOLED screen* is noticeably smaller than the 3.7″ screen of many of the N8’s rivals from the Android world (e.g. Google Nexus One, Motorola XT720, HTC Desire), and also noticeably smaller than the ‘3.5″‘ display of the Apple iPhone. Partly because the nHD screen resolution that’s standard in Symbian at the moment has a natural 16:9 ratio which is slightly ‘slimmer and taller’, but also because the display’s not really 3.5″ – it’s 3.46″. If this seems a little picky, it’s worth pointing out that the Samsung i8910 HD, also running Symbian, is narrower than the N8 and yet packs a full 3.7″ display. The discrepancies are explained by the presence of an unfortunately wide bezel all around the N8 screen, in addition to the curved device sides.

The N8’s display effectively matches that of the N97 for size, but utterly blows the latter away for colour and vibrancy, being AMOLED*. And ‘second generation’ AMOLED at that, with an anti-reflection layer beneath the glass, with the result that it’s far clearer outside in sunlight than the first-gen AMOLED display on the Samsung i8910 HD. Note that this isn’t the polarising technology that Nokia perfected for their imminent ClearBlack Displays (CBD), though you can see why they thought the anti-reflection concept was worth investigating further. I’d pitch the N8’s display for outdoor visibility right alongside the screen in the Samsung Galaxy S (using ‘Super AMOLED’).

* AMOLED’s other potential downside is that the display technology gradually dims over time, though in practice you’d be looking at ten years or so to get down to half brightness and you’re unlikely to notice a significant difference with the naked eye over the year or two you’d own the N8.

(next to the TFT-screened N97 mini)

It’s also worth noting that Nokia has at last started using the ambient light sensor on its phone faces – the N8 has an auto-brightness algorithm built-in – it’s a little spooky at first but after a day or so of use you simply trust it to do the right thing and are thankful for the power saving.

The issue of screen resolution has been a thorny one, with the resolutions of the flagship Android phones being typically 800 by 480 and the iPhone 4 (famously – ‘retina display’) 960 by 640. These numbers make Symbian’s ‘standard’ resolution (now used on the upcoming E7, C6-01 and C7, as well as all the older touchscreen phones) seem a trifle low at 640 by 360, but I can’t emphasise enough that this simply isn’t an issue for most people, including me. The dots-per-inch figure is still relatively high – anyone with 20:20 eyesight may be able to spot the pixels at work, but I found ‘nHD’ on the N8 perfectly smooth and clear (though, as hinted above, some of the fonts used in the current firmware can sometimes be hard to read, due to their light weight and small size).

At the top and bottom of the N8 there are small plastic end caps, in theory colour matched to the main metal body but in practice you can easily see the join(!), providing aerial placement and optimisation for the multitude of RF aerials: the pentaband 3G radio (in the bottom), quad-band GSM radio (in the top), GPS receiver, FM receiver, FM transmitter, WiFi and Bluetooth – it’s not clear yet where these latter aerials are, but we’ve had no problems so far.

The top of the N8 has the power button, HDMI-out port for connection to your digital TV (via the supplied adaptor, and including sending the audio output through with Dolby Digital Plus encoding, should you have any media with this information built-in) and a 3.5mm audio out jack:

On the right of the N8, there are volume/zoom keys, the (essential) key-lock slider and a really satisfying two-stage camera capture key:

On the left side, hidden behind a plastic, flush-fitting tab, is a slot for a microSD card (particularly good to see in the light of some other Symbian^3 releases not being similarly expandable, e.g. the Nokia E7) and, behind another tab, another for the SIM card. This last has to be external because you’ll remember that there’s no removable battery cover – or indeed major access hatch of any kind. Further down on the left is an uncovered microUSB port for charging and data, including the new USB-on-the-Go capability, of which more in a later review part.

Finally, on the N8’s bottom, is a traditional 2mm charging port as well – one of a number of Nokia handsets that now have dual charging options.

Unlike earlier Nokia Symbian^1 phones, there are no call or hangup buttons – all telephony control is now via the touchscreen. Not having buttons to control calls isn’t a huge deal, though will doubtless be missed by some, and there are several third party applications – notably Google Maps/Search – that explicitly used to use the green ‘call’ key for major functions (e.g. voice search), so new versions will be needed in due course.

The remaining hardware button on the design’s front is the Home button, feeling a little odd at first until you get used to the fact that it’s on a sloping panel. Long-pressing this home button brings up the task switcher, as you might expect from the last eight years of S60 and Symbian smartphones, but it’s enhanced here by showing ‘live’ snapshots of what each application is up to (or at least what it was up to at the instant you long pressed the button), so that you can instantly recognise which one is which. Picking an application does involve a fair amount of left/right swiping if you’ve got a lot open, but the novelty of seeing what all the apps are doing doesn’t wear off and this is a fair compromise.

On the N8’s back is, of course, the much-touted 12 megapixel camera (and rightly so – you’ll remember Damian Dinning’s stunning gallery a couple of weeks ago). You’ll remember from my own Camera Nitty Gritty series that megapixels aren’t everything, but it’s easy to make an exception in this case because Nokia has designed the rest of the camera specs to match the pixel count. Here’s my detailed run through the N8 camera innovations, but, in brief:
Xenon flash – the only camera flash technology worthy of the word ‘flash’ – the last couple of years of poor LED-lit party shots can be safely forgotten – see my feature on this.

Very large sensor (rated at ‘1/1.83″‘ optical format – even the previous imaging champion, the N86 only had a ‘1/2.3″‘ sensor, as have many standalone compact cameras).

Carl Zeiss 2.8/28 optics – a mechanical protective sliding shutter for the camera glass was rejected because of bulk (another 3mm would be needed, i.e. a bigger bulge) and, interestingly, also because more and more software is requiring camera access (e.g. augmented reality) and the apps need the picture immediately.

Extra software enhancements. With the larger sensor and better optics, there was apparently less need for Nokia’s traditional noise reduction algorithms, so more processing power could be applied to real time image handling. This is evidenced by lightning fast auto-focus (of order of a tenth of a second or so in good light), with red eye reduction, and with very fast real-time face detection. We’ll have more on camera performance in a future N8 review part.

Mechanical shutter. Much has been made of this online, but perhaps slightly over-hyped, since this isn’t actually anything new for Nokia. The N82, N95, N95 8GB and N86 (to name but four models) all also have great mechanical shutters in their camera units. Still, the presence of a real shutter mechanism, allied to the use (again) of an automatic ND (Neutral Density) filter that slots in when light levels are too high, does give extra confidence when trying to snap shots that are out of the ordinary, light-wise.

Stereo audio recording in video mode, as on the original (stunning for its time) N93. There’s one mike on the camera side, plus the normal one used for voice calls on the N8’s face. The N93 used the stereo to construct a left/right soundscape – the N8 concentrates on applying noise cancellation algorithms, in theory reducing wind noise and also controlling the recording levels in continuous harsh noise environments.

The microphones used are digital, i.e. the same as those used in the N86 8MP, and together with that model, produce the best sound quality of any current phone ‘camcorder’.

Focussing in video mode is ‘fixed’, as on the N86, with the f2.8 aperture giving, in good light, a genuine depth of field of 60cm to infinity. I’ve gone over the pros and cons of the various approaches to video focus in mobile phone cameras before – no focussing and you get blurry subjects; initial focus and you get blurry subjects when the composition changes; continuous auto-focus and you have to wait while focussing gets fixed whenever you change the subject. Simply having great depth of field and letting the user shoot whatever they want without needing any camera knowledge is a very valid solution. See the sample below!

The same intelligent digital zoom in video mode as the N86 – this technology seems to be unique to Nokia – the whole 12mp sensor is used for video capture, with downscaling to the desired resolution happening in custom electronics hardware. This means that up to 3x zoom should be handled without undue pixellation (there’s a ‘hard’ limit on the N8 at 3x, to stop people trying to zoom further and starting to see degraded results) – see below for the sample video which demonstrates this. If you don’t want to use the zoom buttons, double-tapping the screen auto-zooms to 3x immediately – also demonstrated here.

Based on All About Symbian’s first few days with the N8, then, here are some camera still and video samples – click through to enlarge or download any that take your fancy, to see them in their full 12 (or 9) megapixel glory (depending on aspect ratio captured – we’ve supplied a mix).

(the above four taken in hazy sunshine)

(these taken in heavy overcast conditions/indifferent light)

(There’ll be more samples and camera comparisons in part 2 of our N8 review. Of the above images, the last was taken with the N8’s Xenon flash)

Here’s a test of the N8’s video capture, demonstrating three of its main ‘pros’: smooth capture and frame rate, ‘intelligent’ digital zoom and high depth of field. Note that wind noise was a slight problem after all – the ‘noise cancellation’ routines for this didn’t quite work the wonders I was expecting:

Also on the back, embedded in the camera island, is a powerful mono speaker – I’d rate it as up with one of the units in the 5800 or X6, though only being mono means there’s not as much ‘presence’ in the room, when playing. Although the speaker aperture is flush with the camera island, sound isn’t shut off when you put the N8 on a table because of the way the island props the phone at a slight angle – thankfully.

the front face microphone

When we were first handed the N97 to review, around 15 months ago, it was clear that the software wasn’t 100% ready and that there were some issues. The N8 seems far more stable, in terms of multitasking and general operation, thankfully. But, regardless, there are a number of small indications that this is still early firmware and that updates will follow quickly.

Aside from minor glitches in the multi-touch in Web and an issue where 3G data was ‘held’ even when moving back into Wi-Fi coverage, one critical bit of basic functionality is missing – Share online is nowhere to be seen. So you can’t shoot a photo or video and then send it somewhere online, at least not out of the box – a baffling omission in 2010. The same applies to Nokia Podcasting, which we’d all believed would be in the final firmware. Now, third party freeware, in this case Pixelpipe Send and Share (in the Ovi Store) and Symbian Podcatcher (install the Symbian^1 version for now, there’s an issue with the S^3-optimised one) takes up the slack in these areas, but it’s a shame not to have the original apps in the device from the get go and I’d hope that one or both of these will be rectified by Nokia in due course.

If you’re after my very early verdict on the Nokia N8, then it’s positive, with only a few caveats. If you’re a bit of a camera nut like me, then don’t hesitate to buy – it’s stunning. If you’re looking for a more rounded 2010 smartphone then you’ve got more to take into account – not least the rest of my/our review over the next week or two. And it’s worth bearing in mind that a modern smartphone, especially on a new platform, is a complex entity and it’ll take us a few weeks of intensive use to deliver a more thorough verdict.

Source : http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/reviews/item/12149_Nokia_N8_part_1_hardware_and_m.php