The Nokia N8 Review! I miss you

The lovely Tom at WOM World Nokia saved my (mobile) life 2 weeks ago when they offered me a Nokia N8 to test while my C6-00 was off for repair.

On arrival I was like a child with a new toy, or Tigger with extra bounce. The N8 I have wanted since the Nokia World 2010 Event unveiling.

I've not had a rush of excitement over a device since my Motorola V66. Placing it in my hand it felt solid, The anodised aluminium was cold, leaving a feeling your carrying a high end device. Weight wise it felt perfect.

Turning it on was painlessly quick in comparison to the LG Optimus One and the C6-00 , set-up again was simple and easy, I would say 10 mins we were away.

The home screen is standard of symbian wares in the past, as are the menus. making the general user experience seem normal to everyday users, but to apple or droid user may be confused.

The touchscreen is a capacitive AMOLED display and dang it is gorgeous. Works great in the sunlight and produces some real amazing colours. It can be over-sensitive in the corners holding the phone has resulted in opening the phone's dialler or exiting applications unintentionally, annoying but I'm blaming my clumsiness here. But a calibration tool would have been useful.

Internet on the N8 averages out around 2.8mb on Vodafone in the strongest 3g areas, and 1.3MB on the Sure Signal device at home (using speedtest.net mini test) Wireless connectivity worked out of the box and secured wifi worked perfectly too.

One thing that surprised me was how stable the browser was in comparison to the C6-00 and N97 mini's offerings.

The N8-00 can play most flash content perfectly. Compared to android refusing to load content, including some video services. Tainted by the C6-00's small memory I won't lie. I was expecting it to inform me it was out of memory then crash, but. It didn't the device stayed solid. Even loading heavier content from parentdish and Adobe Flash content from the potential NSFW madhouse that is Pown.it (link is safe but other content on site is not) Flash content did stutter when zooming out to fit the content on the screen, but recovers very quickly.

I found the USB on the go function one of the most useful to use, plugging in a USB hub, then a Keyboard and mouse into the hub. Plug the N8 into the TV with the provided HDMI lead and there you have a full computing experience from a tiny device.

Call quality seemed to be the same as the C6, but slightly better than the LG offering, even in poor signal areas it worked well.

Now onto Symbian OS. It's an elderly operating system going back in the days to early Psion devices with Epoc, which has progressed to many different variants of Symbian. Today we're rocking Symbian ^3 or s60 of Symbian exist PR 2 or Symbian ANNA on the way soon with more updates coming over the next few years it's going to be a safe bet it'll keep up better than many other products.
One huge advantage of Symbian is it was designed with lower powered devices in mind, meaning cheaper hardware, and in comparison to most smartphone platforms, Longer battery life, this is useful for heavy users.

Lets look at that camera.

Many Nokia devices have a fairly decent Camera, then a device comes and raises the bar even higher. The N8 raised the bar stupidly high in comparison to the N97, 6700s and the N95.

At 12 Megapixels This is a monster camera with xenon flash, coupled in with the Carl Zeiss optics and one of the largest sensors to appear on a cellphone, measuring 1/1.83", it's a beast of a camera, and judging from the photos taken by it can perform and compete with higher end cameras with ease.
The camera is also capable of filming HD too, I have a quick test I'll be uploading them to youtube once the blog is up (need to check them over in first)

Here are some sample pictures. (I only spent a few days using the N8 Camera School. So expect better in the future) Click the links below to see some of the N8's snaps.

Here
Here

Here

Also try some on MoloME

Sadly I didn't get much chance to get more due to job interviews and poorly 2 year olds wanting cuddles. :(

Gaming on the device is pretty good too. Angry birds was tested, that had minimal lag with the odd slowdown, but considering it the nokia has half the memory, and a decent graphics accelerator meaning a good all round gaming experience, Even older J2ME (java) games work, but are a tad more cumbersome due to the lack of buttons.

Purchasing apps in the Ovi (soon to be renamed Nokia) Store was a fairly decent expereience with minimal hassle, but it kept loosing connection at times, which is a widespread bug according to the guru's at Symbian Tweet with no update planned yet. It's a quirky issue but should have been solved by now i feel.

Products from the store range from the absolutely amazing Gravity Twitter Client, to the aboslute rubbish fart applications. Not forgetting Epically amazing Educational apps made by a 12 year old inspired to help his sister. In fairness the store does need improvements to find things easier, but that may happen in future updates. The Ovi team like to keep the community as a whole happy.

The handset handled the transfer of my contact's, Email, bookmarks and calendar to the N8 quite well, with minimal effort required for the odd truncated entry.

Every day use consisted of web browsing, Snaptu (facebook, twitter and tech articles) it never failed me, with true multitasking, changing between utilities, web based services and documentation was a simple task of holding the menu button for a second.

In conclusion

The device worked how I wanted, when I wanted with little issues. Symbian could probably benefit from a faster process and a touch more RAM, but it performed well enough to be considered a long term device in comparison to many similarly priced device. Then the SIM free cost. Currently it's at £365 this is an amazing price for a high end device, with 16Gb of internal storage, and the ability to add another 32Gb on the memory card slot. You are on to a media player winner here. Glitches are being worked on by the boffin's at Nokia so you have a future proofed device in a colourful shell.

One more thing.

NOKIA. Please make the N8 and E7 in Purple.

You make it in purple. I'll buy it. Today, even if i have to sell my spleen to get it.

I recommend the device to many, even trying to convert iPhone users to the Nokia quality.

Get yours ASAP!

Paul

The LG Optimus One Trial Part two.

Hello Everyone! :)

It's been a while and many a problem to sort out behind the scenes so for that I apologise.
But, as promised. Part two of the optimus one review is here.

The LG Optimus One's is a darned sturdy feeling device. with power/lock button and headphone jack on the top, volume rocker on the top right and four buttons on the front of the device and last but not least the capacitive touchscreen.
On the back of the device is the 3.15mp Camera which comes with autofocus and without flash

It's Rocking Android 2.2 with flash support, and as previously mentioned LG have been quite good not to customise without making a hash of it. Looking at the home screen it's tidy and scrolling between the 5 or 7 home screens (you choose) brings a fluid scrolling experience .

The menus still confuse the daylights out of me, as basic things i would expect in a menu are buried in other parts of applications and settings. That said I've only JUST got used to using the text input on the device.

As were here lets move to inputting text on the device.
The device has three keypads installed, the LG Keyboard and Alphanumeric and the Android default one, the image on the right shows the android default at the top and the LG one below.

I admit the text input is an enormous learning curve, as I'm used to belting it out on a slide out keyboard has proven to be one of the largest learning curves I have to overcome, and the experience nearly killed the whole feel of the phone for me, but this in fairness is due to my learning experience with the handset, not the phones fault. And last night I spent a good few hours playing with the keypad to master it.

Now, lets move to browsing.

The browsing experience is a pleasure. An experience compatible to the iPod touch, We did have he occasional wobble with flash content, although this was due to Adobe and it's partners delay in sending the update. But this does not kill the experience, in fairness it works well, Google really have done a good job with the browser.

The device has shown me that a lower end device can trump the competition and do it spectacularly well too even with a few quirks like the lack of interactive flash content and youtube content, though the latest flash update is on the way.

Using this for social networking is a dream. Youtube, Twitter and Facebook work out of the box. slap your details in and you're good to go, with all applications feeling quite complete, and no feelings of slowness or instability, well. Until I play games then we see an issue.

For instance Angry Birds by Rovio. This can work perfectly, then suddenly grind so a crawl. in a way it's reminiscent of playing Doom on my first pc. Slow and painful at times but still fun.
in fairness I feel the advertising in the app are the problem there. (if LG want me to keep the device I may be able to try more paid apps)
It's a good performer there, but there are newer devices that will outperform it in more demanding tasks, but for the price it's good!

One thing that amazes me is the Wifi connectivity. it's rarely failed me at all. even connecting to free providers with ease. The configuration is confusing but works well.

The camera is a good performer. I would say it's in par with the Nokia E71 without the purple hue. (images will be on flickr soon, I'm still tagging things now)

Music and video quality is spot on with this device, coming from the LG headphones or my Sony high end set both bring crisp audio with the right amount of bass.

Call quality has been strange. Now I use a Vodafone Sure Signal inside the flat, giving a HSDPA signal inside the house, as n extra mast. Now at times it dislikes the witchcraft of a home mast leaving call quality as useless, but the rest of the time it's sharp and crisp. they have done an excellent job on the voice quality on this device.

Now for the important bit. Would I buy this?

I would say Yes, yes I really would. It works flawlessly. any problems are mainly my learning curve, and it does show from my use it has to be doing something right to sell over a million devices. so Top Work LG.

I have to say the Keyboards Image is not mine and is from the following blog. Please go and say hello to Miss Tin A Pie as a way to say thanks
http://misstinapie.blogspot.com/2010/12/urban-adventures-switching-to.html

For now Part three is coming. the final chapter of the LG optimus one. My final thoughts on this device.

For now - PEACE!

Paul :)