Well now, this is awkward. Only yesterday Mobile-Review was calling the N8 an unpolished turd, and now Nokia’s gone and announced it to the world. As leaks foretold, it’s got a 12MP camera with Xenon flash and runs Symbian^3.
It’s Nokia’s first Symbian^3 phone, and while initial videos and photos made it look pretty special indeed, Mobile-Review’s early look at it warranted a big, fat “do not like”. As I said yesterday, that could be because it was an early prototype – time will tell, in any case.
Onto the specs, and that camera has Carl Zeiss optics and the Xenon flash most Nokias are blessed with. It can record video in 720p and thanks to the HDMI output, can play footage on HDTVs.
The screen is a 3.5-inch capacitive touchscreen, and there’s 16GB of inbuilt storage, expandable up to 48GB if you’ve got the requisite microSD memory card. As with all the next-gen Nokia handsets, free Ovi Maps is included.
The US pricing and availability hasn’t been confirmed by Nokia yet, but for now we’ve been told the pre-taxes European cost will be €370 ($533), but it’ll of course be available for free on contract. Out in the third quarter, so we’re looking at another few months at the very least. [Nokia Conversations]
Update: Full list of specs here.
Mike Biggs
Wednesday, April 28, 2010 at 10:13 AMI’m sure once again its great hardware with fantastic features (on paper), but aslong as Nokia runs a variant of Symbian they will fall 2nd/3rd/last. Everytime I trust Symbian I end up getting stung and disapointed. The N97 I have is a great piece of gear, but the OS sucks. There are only like 2000 apps in Ovi store, which never took off, most of them badly programmed and useless crud (News and Weather..snore), and only 30% are free; compared to Apple store where there is 100,000+ and the majority are free.
I dont wanna sound like an Apple fanboy, but unfortunately, its like the old Microsoft on PC story. Where the apps and programs are, then thats where the people will go, and that isnt Nokia right now. iPhone might be locked down to iTunes etc, but at least it works and works well, and all the apps do what they are meant to. Jailbreak it, and the world is yours. My iPhone is running Android now, and Linux…theres nothing alternative for Nokia (who’s locked down now?).
A 12mp camera…whats the use when it has a 2mm lens and no optical zoom? (my brand new DSLR as 12mp!) 48gb of storage, for what…all music, rad shakey 720p vid, apps??? I see no logical and solid benefit in the N8 over a 3GS. Its key features are easily excusable.
Due to Nokias past personal failures, I’ll stick with the devil I know as opposed to the Pope I dont. /Nokia-rant
Simon Reidy
Thursday, April 29, 2010 at 9:41 AMWow. No matter how much hatred you have for Symbian or Nokia phones, noone can deny the quality of that clip given it’s from a mobile phone. Not just the excellent detail, colour fidelity, lack of jaggies/pixelation and sharpness, but the superb frame rate!! (30 progressive frames a second is damn good for a phone). Nokia certainly chose wisely showing off that dude’s super fast moves as there was so much detail retained in motion, thanks to the nice high frame rate and high shutter speed.
Mike: For the most part I agree with you, and that’s why I’m a jailbroken iPhone owner who is considering moving to Android for his next handset. Nokia’s efforts with Symbian and Maemo have all been consistently crappy to date and I’m sure that the N8 will have a lot to dislike about it’s UI too. Having said that, I imagine they have put a ton of R&D into the latest Symbian revision and it’s good to see them at least getting with the times with features like capacitive display, touch optimised navigation, social integration and decent web browsing.
There’s no question that any Nokia handset can’t compete with the iPhone or Android app markets. However I really don’t think people buy Nokia phones with the aim of heavily customising them with 3rd party apps. Even though Nokia might call the N8 a smartphone, to me it still comes across as more of a “feature phone” that has a strong emphasis on photos and video, and let’s face it this is one area that Nokia truly excels at. No matter what Apple pull out of their hat I’d be extremely surprised if the next iPhone can take 720p video or 12mp stills of the quality of the Nokia promo pics and vids released so far.
While no one would disagree with you that a dedicated camera/and or video camera will have superior sensor/optics, optical zoom and better quality overall, the N8 is the highest quality cameraphone ever released, and the quality is sufficiently high enough for me to not feel like I would need to lug around a separate dedicated camera if I owned an n8. It would be awesome to know that you have such a high quality camera and video recorder in your pocket for any occasion.
All about Symbian have put up a very interesting post breaking down the camera’s quality/features in detail and it’s well worth a read: http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/features/item/The_making_of_the_Nokia_N8s_camera.php
Having said all the above, as I stated earlier I still think I’ll go for Android or the next iPhone. I just can’t wait for higher quality cameras like the one in the N8 to become the norm :)
Jacques Fortesque
Thursday, April 29, 2010 at 6:13 PMwhy does it always come down to how many apps are available?
I-victims prattle on about this without accepting the fact that being able to electronically reproduce a fart isn’t a pre-requisite for a good mobile device. Neither is having 500 iterations of a calculator.
Judge a device on it’s communications capabilities, it’s stability and it’s UI, not on the previous version of the mobile platform it’s based on and most certainly not on the number of useless, buggy and often totally irrelevant applications that have been made for it….
just my 2 cents :)
Jason O'Neil
Tuesday, May 11, 2010 at 5:22 PMJust a quick comment about the lack of apps for Nokia phones. Nokia realizes this, and has invested in a long term solution by attracting programmers by offering the QT framework.
Basically it’s a superb open source framework, already used in desktop applications like VLC, Maya and KDE. It’s one of the easiest ways to write high quality desktop apps, and Nokia has taken that momentum and brought it to the mobile space, setting up some really cool tools for developers to make useful apps, rather than another RSS reader, fart or flashlight app.
Take a look:
http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2010/05/06/qt-creator-and-beyond-quick/
These apps will be able to run on almost all Nokia devices (even my old 6210), but you need to set up QT and that’s the sort of thing only nerds do. The N8 is the first phone to come with this by default, and so it’ll be run all these new apps out of the box.
Nokia’s hoping to get more developers on board, so there’ll be more apps, and this phone is an important part of this strategy.
I look forward to trying it out :)
Jason
Reason A Bubble
Sunday, June 13, 2010 at 1:27 AMThe Nokia smart phones are aimed at a more utilitarian community who want their phone to enhance rather than become their life.
The sexy Iphone is for fashion conscious people who crave a sense of belonging and acceptance. They are quite prepared to overlook basic needs like video calling capabilities in return for an application community that encourages their own hidden banality…. “celebrate your individuality- buy an Iphone like everyone else”. Apple are marketing geniuses, the people they target are the lowest common denominators.
Aus99
Sunday, June 20, 2010 at 7:55 AMdoes N8 have internet radio app and can realplayer play in background and allow multitasking.