Hands on with Nokia's flagship N8

Reliability

My much loved N97 began having the well-documented freezing issues recently and, upon receiving it from it's second repair, was pronounced finally, unresolvably dead.

This time round I will be waiting at least 6 months before upgrading to this phone (or whatever's around) because I have no faith in Nokia's touchscreen phone reliability anymore.

I would be interested to read more about the N8 once it's been in reviewers hands for a while but even the new additions and gesture-based UI goodies haven't sold me yet and I'm a Nokia fanboi.

How often do you see somebody in town with a high-end Nokia phone these days?

Errr ... everytime I see someone with an N900, me included!

(Oh, and my partner too.)

Cheeky Monkey!

Do not see anything to upgrade to

There is simply not enough appeal in this to make me upgrade either my E71 or my wife's N95. With the latest software they both work good enough and with third party cables happily charge from USB (my greatest gripe with old Nokias - the bloody bespoke charger).

If one of them breaks, the price point looks appealing, but that is probably the only case where I may buy one. Otherwise I will just sit this one out and wait until Android and Maemo properly catch up with iPhone in about a year's time.

As far as the HDMI it will get as much use as the composite cable which was shipped with all N95s. I have yet to meet a person who has used it and there is a very good reason for it. It is called REMOTE or to be more exact the lack of thereof. Is it so bloody difficult to make the phone itself be remote-controllable via the standard bluetooth remote control profile for which there is an app already.

One more thing

There is one other feature of the N8 that was not mentioned in the review: it is quad band GSM and five (quin?) band UMTS - ie 850MHz / 900MHz / AWS (ie T-Mobile US) / 1900MHz / 2100MHz - meaning it will work with any GSM family network in the world. Well done Nokia for that.

Finally a new handset with decent specs:

680MHz CPU, 256MB RAM, 3D Accelerator

Screen aside, this thing slightly edges out the N900 for under-the-hood hardware specs. You can even get the same 'Bounce' game for it often used to demo the N900s graphics prowess.

I'll be keeping my Linux based N900 for some time however.

OS

why are they still arseing around with s60? from the sounds of it this phone would rock with android. and get rid of these silly bugs that should have been sorted years ago.

Multiple Home Screen pages

"I find Android's choice of multiple pages on the home screen pretty pointless and nerdy"

..never found some useful widgets then?

I have 7 screens on my N1 and use at least 5 daily..

Camera clarifications

Hi Andrew, it was good to see you at the event in London today.

I just wanted to clarify a few points you raised re the camera.

The pinch gesture in the still camera switches between 16:9 and 4:3 aspect ratios. In video it switches between 720p 16:9 video and VGA 4:3 aspect ration video. It's not used in camera to control zoom as it would cause significant camera movement and therefore result in jerky videos. There is a double tap for those occassions you want to reset the zoom or zoom as quickly as possible from one end of the zoom range to the other.

Using the hardware camera key it is possible to take images if the subject can't be focused upon (perhaps due to insufficient contrast or illumination and the subject is out of range of the focus assist LED). There is a touch based shutter key. Touching this activates the AF system and as soon as the subject is in focus it releases the shutter. In both cases it will prioritise autofocus before releasing the shutter. If it is unable to focus it will set the lens to hyper focal distance so you have the best chance of the subject still being in focus and then release the shutter. It will confirm the final focus status using red or green for the autofocus target area.

Not being able to talk to you at the time about these problems I'm unable to explain the cause of the difficulties you experienced. However, in my own personal experience the autofocus system is working very well even in total darkness up to the range of the flash and extremely fast, typically around just 350ms. However, given your comments I will be looking into this tomorrow as a matter of priority to ensure we haven't missed anything in this regard.

re focus in video. I believe the clip we presented today demonstrated how extremely well the Nokia N8 handles video recording even for a subject moving from one side of the frame to the other. [For those not present we demonstrated a video of a girl on a swing moving across the frame and back repeatedly]. I believe continuous AF would not have been able to track such a moving subject and maintain crisp detail in the way that the N8's Active Hyper Focal distance system is able to in such a situation. It's in fact situations exactly like this that encouraged us to use the system the Nokia N8 does to ensure reliable and dependable focus from around 60cm all the way through to infinity.

very best regards

Damian

Re: Somewhat fixed battery and other isues

Hi fellow AC,

The reason *why* they've semi-locked in the battery is purely to aid your 'perception' of build quality; there shouldn't be any rattles/fexing of the shell in use due to the battery being less-than-rock-solidly-mounted.

Re the N900; it has *most* of my needs BUT would have preferred it to have

* At least a 4.3- inch screen (like the HTC HD2), 5 inches EVEN better with 16:9/ 854 x 480 or even QFHD 960 x 540 pixels AND IT SHOULD SLIDE AND TILT!!

** The BLASTED KEYBOARD SHOULD HAVE BEEN AT LEAST THE 5 - ROW EQUAL OF THE HTC TOUCH PRO2

*** The processor was fine as launched; the RAM on the other hand I would have preferred to be 512 MB

If the TouchPro2- style Slide'N'Tilt screen wasn't used, the next best option would have been to design it as a bigger E90 Communicator : coupled with a 4.3 - to 5-inch screen, the increased RAM , bigger keyboard and space for the larger 1500 MAh battery, this would have come with the N95 8GB outer screen and KILLED the moaning about the lack of portrait orientation in most usage configs.

You may recall that until the E90, all earlier Communicators had an outer screen that was used for placing calls, reading/ composing SMS and obtaining basic status updates. If they had released the N900 in Communicator form, it would have also captured a LOT of the disgruntled E90 fraternity that are bemoaning the lack of an upgrade roadmap (until bedding-down of Symbian ^3/4)

The other benefit is that a Psion Revo- sized Maemo 5 Communicatorr with aforementioned specs would sell in exponentially greater numbers than the Booklet (dual- boot Win7 netbook) oddity they're trying to flog as a circa-£650 proof of concept!!

Do any of these Nokia lot know where one can get a consulting gig or are interminable amounts of gobshite and ridiculous swirly prototypes a prequisite?

Scrolling

"You don't need scrollbars if it's a true direct manipulation UI, you just swipe. I can't understand why they're there."

Because swiping only really lets you scroll a screen's width/height at a time, and if you've got a big page to scroll, that's a royal pain (this is a flaw of Nokia's web browser in the 5800). Scroll bars are good in that they not only let you scroll rapidly across a large range, but also allow you to tap either side of the handle to scroll a page at a time for accurate positioning (eg the contacts list in the 5800).

Nokia with stopgap OS shocker

Seriously, isn't it about time Nokia stopped reeling from the appearance of the *2007* iPhone and actually produced something with a decent UI? From this review it's obvious that after all the excuses, this is just another stopgap phone with an inconsistent mess of old patched-up S60 still flopping all over the place. How much longer do they expect anyone to care?

One of the posters above tried to justify S60 on the basis that people put up with XP on their desktop. Here's a newsflash - XP is obsolete. People use it because they have to, but nobody *has* to use S60 on a new smartphone. There's simply nothing that it does that isn't done better, more easily, and more productively on other platforms.