Nokia N8 Review: Nokia's New Flagship
by Mithun Chandrasekhar on January 12, 2011 1:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Nokia
- N8
- Symbian
- Mobile
What’s HAPPening at Nokia…
It’s all about the applications now. Ever since Apple pushed the concept of apps and app development to the mainstream in 2008, companies such as Nokia have been caught off-guard. This is the one area where Nokia still has a lot of work to do. The N8, as with almost all Nokia devices in recent history, has a very inconsistent and frustrating app ecosystem. As with the E5, the Ovi Store app doesn’t even come installed by default on the N8. Instead, clicking on the Ovi Store shortcut in the menu opens up the browser and takes you to a page where you are required to setup an Ovi Store account and download the app. This is ridiculous enough in itself, but to make things worse, I could not get the app store working no matter what I tried on the N8.
(Left, Center) The Ovi Store was a pain to get up and running on the N8; (Right) when the Ovi Store works
Each and every time I tried opening the Ovi Store, the browser would be launched and it would open up a blank page with the Ovi Store icon on top. Nothing would happen after this, no matter what I did. Searching on the internet, I found that this was in fact a well-known problem that multiple people were facing with the N8 and apparently had to do with a particular version of the Ovi Store app having problems with Symbian^3 devices. Deleting and trying to re-download the app didn’t help. Finally, the only thing that seemed to work was to log into the Ovi Store via the PC, searching for the Ovi Store app, and sending a download link for it to the phone via text. Really, Nokia?
And it’s not just the Ovi Store app that had issues either. The default email app basically doesn’t work the way it should. Unlike the E5 where there was a definite (if non-obvious) procedure to getting push email working, on the N8 there is no set procedure. Accepting or declining Nokia’s terms and conditions while setting up your email account decides whether or not push notifications are enabled. With push notifications enabled, the N8 refused to sync my Gmail inbox after a couple of hours. Deleting an email from the N8 would have no effect on my Gmail inbox.
Worse yet, the push-email system on the N8 does not let you select the folders you want to sync. Since the N8’s email client didn’t have an “Archive” option, I was forced to mark and move emails to the “All Mails” folder, only to find out that this folder is not available for sync with push notifications turned on. Since this was absolutely essential to the way I used Gmail, I decided to forego push functionality and set up my email accounts again, declining the terms and conditions and with a polling interval of every 10 minutes.
Although you do have control over the folders you want to sync via this method and the N8 does faithfully poll the Gmail servers every 10 mins as configured, no matter what I did, I could not get it to sync my emails properly. To elaborate, if I marked an email as read and deleted it, upon the next sync, it would still show up as unread in my inbox. If I manually “moved it to trash”, after syncing, I would still see it as an unread email in the “All Mails” folder. Again, a quick search on the internet reveals that I’m not alone.
(L-R) The inconsistent email app, clunky default browser, browser menu, Opera Mobile 10
The last bit of software that Nokia needs to upgrade, pronto, is the lethargic webkit-based browser on the N8. Hoping that this would have definitely been one of the updates to Symbian^3, I was disappointed to find that apart from tweaking the UI to be touch more friendly, not much has changed with the browser. The GPU-accelerated UI definitely makes things more responsive, and the vibrant 3.5” screen is a marked improvement over the 2.36” in the E5, but the browser itself is very slow and inconsistent in its rendering. It cannot hold a candle next to Mobile Safari, or the Android/WebOS Webkit browsers.
Once again, Opera Mobile 10 mitigates these problems, picks up Nokia’s slack, and makes surfing the web on the N8 a decent experience. But it is an absolute shame that Nokia did not update the browser in this release of Symbian^3. Thankfully however, Nokia has promised to update the browser with the next update, and I sincerely hope they live up to this promise.
(L-R) A very good Nokia Swype app; the photo browser app makes good use of the GPU; the excellent Ovi Maps
Other apps worked as they should, including the excellent Ovi Maps app. The N8 uses its integrated GPS, A-GPS and WiFi-positioning for navigation duties and also sports a compass. You can have a look at a more detailed discussion of Ovi Maps in my E5 review here. I did however notice with the N8 that it took an awful long time to get hold of a cold GPS signal, and Nokia made a questionable decision of not including maps on the N8 out of the box.
One feature that I found very interesting was the “Turning Control” that could be used to silence a call or snooze an alarm, simply by flipping the N8 over on its front. The N8 is now my official snooze tool! The music player uses a Cover Flow-esq design that works very well with the GPU driving the fluid animation. And although I couldn’t test the video calling function out-of-the-box (and with Skype not having implemented Video Chat capability on the Symbian platform), I did manage to make a few test calls with Fring and it seems to work just fine (although a friend of mine did say that she couldn’t see my video on her iPod Touch 2G).
(L-R): Video call on Fring; Skype on S^3; some of the interesting Nokia Beta apps
Also, I encourage you to look up Nokia’s beta apps portal, as there seem to be some really interesting albeit experimental apps in there. I found an excellent Swype keyboard implementation, a cool photo browser that makes very good use of the GPU, and the very interesting “Nokia Bots” applications in there, amongst others.
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alovell83 - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
"And with one such update promised for the N8 sometime in Q1 2011, it may be the device to recommend, after the update."Unfortunately, after the update this phone will be what, 6+ months on the market? With no more flagship phones running on Symbian I'd never recommend this OS to a friend, even if they are familiar with Symbian.
Meego should be able to help Nokia remain competitive, this phone, unfortunately for Nokia and it's fans, wont be of great use to a consumer outside of the cameraphone aficionados.
alovell83 - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
Also, in case anyone wants to say how easy it is to cross-develop apps for Meego & Symbian, from what I read, that much is true. However, I wouldn't want my OS to be reliant on Meego's adoption rates and apps when Meego has no hardware release dates and is showing up to this party quite late.deputc26 - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
Hmmm a little grandiloquentAntibios - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link
A tad sesquipedaliananactoraaron - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
other reasons to not recommend: wifi pathetic, talk time sub par by today's standards horribly slow web browser (which is why you need more 3g battery life- the damn pages take forever to load!), screen res below what I would call the current industry standard (thanks to android devices), and lastly when you make an unlocked phone that you are trying to sell for ~$600US (typical for Nokia flagships) you DO NOT put in a 99 cent ARM 11 chip!! Can you say overpriced? And where the heck is the 1500 mAh battery found in almost every other nokia phone? I guess when you lose that much marketshare you can't afford to put quality components in your flagship. My guess is that Nokia already had this camera/sensor/flash prior to their imminent demise. Same with the 1200 mAh batteries now found on their phones. Sad really.A turd is a turd, even if it is well built.
Voldenuit - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
Firstly, it is not selling for $600. It can be found for $399 at a lot of places and newegg is selling it for $429. For an unlocked pentaband phone, that's not a bad deal, especially since it comes with a camera as good as found on $400 compacts (S95, LX5 are ~$400).Secondly, Mithun's 3G talk time results seem egregious to me. The GSM talk times are a lot longer (I've had hour long conversations on the phone that did not dent the battery gauge, sadly don't have the resources/money to test talk times like AT), and there's not much to gain from going 3G for talk anyway.
The CPU is slow, yes, but it's not a handicap for the device in practical use. It's as snappy as a 3GS, and the GPU is great for gaming - played Angry Birds, NFS Shift and Galaxy on Fire with no slowdowns. It's also played 720p videos without a hitch - remarkably, the phone stayed cool to the touch even after a 1 hr+ video session with a 720p mkv for me.
Slow webkit browser is slow, fortunately Opera Mobile is decent for general web use (as opposed to synthetic benchmarks). Definitely one area Nokia could improve on though.
It may not be the Ferrari of phones, but it is a far cry from a turd.
mythun.chandra - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
I actually tested the 3G talk time twice and it was about the same. As I mentioned in the review, I could get away with using the N8 over a GSM-only network with moderate usage for almost 3 days. So yes, the GSM talk time is better.Voldenuit - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
Thanks for clarifying, mithun.As an aside, you can force the phone to use GSM/Edge for calls by putting it in power saving mode (click on battery icon in top right hand corner, or push power button once and select from options).
anactoraaron - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
<sigh> there's always a nokia fanboy that bought the phone and has to post to defend their purchase... Yeah newegg has it at $429 now but do you see the "was $549"? That would make it MSRP of $549 which last time I checked would make it "~$600" (just south of $600). My point is and still remains that if Nokia wants a NEW "flagship" phone it seriously falls short by today's standards (set by apple and android phones). And the 3GS is outdated. It came out in ~August of 2009. Is Nokia then trying to compete with 1.5 year old phone hardware?? No wonder they are losing that massive amount of their marketshare. If I want to play handheld games I will buy a DS or PSP due to large quantity of titles available for them. Let's face it, these days cell phones are for 2 main things.1: making phone calls. And I don't care about GSM talk time. I don't want to have to go through all of the menus to find the obscure option to switch to GSM every time I want to have a long phone call and then back again to get online.
2: Quick web surfing, including posting tweets and facebook updates and the occasional youtube upload. And the numbers for Opera Mobile aren't that good either.
I see you have no comment on screen res or wifi performance. Yeah it stays cool at the lousy res since anything higher will stress the "great GPU". It's the same as pc's- when you increase the res it's more demanding on the gpu. Sure it's got a great camera. Which is why nokia went out of their way to say it over and over so everyone would overlook everything else.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a Nokia "hater" as I have had numerous Nokia phones (most recently an E63). But I can remember the days that Nokia hardware across the board was innovative, not just feature packed. Using an outdated cpu, bad wifi, short battery life talk time (seemingly a nokia first), failing to get to 800x400... I basically already said these things. I expect better from Nokia (and so should you).
The N900 is going for the same $429 right now. Why buy this phone? For the camera?
Exodite - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
Pricing varies a lot between markets I presume.For the sake of comparison the Nokia N8 costs ~4000 SEK here while the Desire HD is ~5100 SEK (recently dropped from 5600 SEK) and the iPhone 4 16GB is ~7000 SEK (~8300 SEK for 32GB).
I can't speak for the rest of the world but it offers high-end smartphone features at a price point significantly lower than the competition.
Surely that's not a bad thing?
At that price you really have to compare the N8 to mid-range smartphone, like the HTC Legend or Aria.