Home Screen & User Interface

-The home screen is just like the N97,but symbian^3 only add one more homescreen and some modification so to me its not a big improvement,i still like the
Homescreen,its my first time using this new Homescreen.I still can feel lagging on the homescreen i hope it will be improve on future firmware update,
when in the menu,its feels like s60 first edition phone,its like not much have changed except the layout menu have change to the bottom in landscape mode.
so i feel a little dissapointed because only homescreen have been change and not the menu.However,i like some changes on the menu like one touch
to open folder or apps.Organizing folder or app a lot better,just hold and move to other folder without no longer change to the folder we choose.
contact,call and sms

-contacts to me its just same like the s60v5,nothing different so much.call are the best,its integrated with contacts but only can use in potrait
mode which kinda dissapointed me,i hope call in landscape mode and multitouch keypad enable in future firmware.Sms is great,
it have smiley! easy for me to use smiley whenever i want message with my friend and when message arrive it will open in conversaton or inbox
based on what we choose,but i choose conversation because its better.

Video Player, Music Player and Photo Viewer

-when transfer my .avi type video,i thinking that im sure the phone wont support this video format,but when i try play it,that time im smiling
it works!until now i do not need to convert any video i transfer.Music player,is really fast and smooth,the mono speaker is loud also but its dissapointed
me when i heard it mono speaker and when compared to my 5800xm its like the 5800xm win.Coverflow is the best thing,just scroll left to right with big
album cover,its impress me.but when i see the coverflow its like its have been copied from iphone coverflow which make me think nokia dont have idea anymore.
photo viewer is nice got pinch to zoom,double touch to zoom,smooth scrolling.but sometimes when fullzoom,the pictures will not show and the only way to fix
it is restart the phone.

camera

-its first time for me to see 12mp cam with big sensor phone(damn great!!),last time i have camping and reception all my friend want me to take pictures with the nokia n8
very high quality picture when i take,even when in low light condition at in my house.but the software camera is lack of some feature like continuous
autofocus,not very nice camera ui.one thing dissapointed me is no flash when record at night,it makes the phone useless when recording at night.

browser

-The loading time arent too good maybe because im using 1mbps streamyx only,but when compared to opera,i just want to say opera win 100%.
default browser now support Flash Lite 4.Pinch and zoom or double tap i lagging makes me not using the default browser.also with 640x360 resolution
its very nice when surfing the web compare to other phone which now have bigger resolution than nokia phone right now.when scrolling the KS also lagging
when i nzoom mode.

gaming,system hardware,system

-gaming to me its like psp,i tried play nfs shift,sim 3 its smooth but some time the game having lag maybe because not enough juice?to me arm11 680mhz is
not enough sometime when i click to open folder it takes about 3 second to open it and scrolling web page also very slow but i fast compared to s60v5,i would recommand
nokia to use arm cortex processor with higher processing power and also maybe bigger ram.symbian^3 is great it just need few improvent and stable the firmware because
right now im having problem with the phone like it suddenly force to restart,sim card error,low memory,lagging and others.

overall to me
-What I like:

*Design - Looks great and feels great on the hand,Hardware - The phone looks rock solid,the screen is great and the Gorilla Glass seems to handle everything,
UI feels much smoother than with S60v5 phones,2 TV-Out - HDMI and 3.5mm jack,USB on the go,The cables included are a plus,FM Transmitter,GPS and Free Navigation,
True Multi-Tasking - The new view of multi-tasking is really nice with option to close one or all apps,In-Built browser has flash support,
The possibility to view messages in the Classic view (inbox/sent) and in Conversation view satisfy both worlds.It has smile support too.
Battery Life - easily lasts a day and most times more than 2 days (moderate use). This is good when it comes to smartphones
Camera - 12mp and HD cam and excellent photo quality, some nice features as face detection and macro mode
gaming - HD like Games

-What I didn't like:

*Limitations while customizing the homescreen
      - no way to add one shortcut, they are always added in groups of 4
      - everything is added in groups of lines
      - no more than 3 homescreens
In-Built browser is laggy in most of the sites,Poor in options on the camera - no shutter speed and aperture options and ISO settings
are still based on low/med/high,The smooth in the UI is still behind the high-end Android phones and iOS with some little lags here,
Few dedicated Symbian^3 apps on Ovi Store but most of S60V5 apps will work,In-built battery - I'm one of those who think that batteries should be
at reach of a normal users,not very fast processor and big ram.
sorry for my english and thank you.

Exterior

The exterior looks classy. It is built of anodized aluminium and the weight is just right. It is not too heavy and not too light. Nokia N8 fits into your hand very well. It not too bulky. Nokia N8′s slim structure easily fits any pocket. I am surprised that Nokia has made the battery “built-in” for this phone. Yes, you can’t easily take out the battery although Nokia is just using a BL-4D battery for N8. It can void your warranty as you may need to remove some screws. It is a disadvantage because Nokia N8′s battery doesn’t last long and will not be very much suitable for those who are traveling a lot because of this.

I also have a feel that the “Nokia Nseries” at the back of the phone can easily peel off.

Call quality and basic features

As usual, Nokia N8 is doing extremely good in call quality. The other party can hear you very well and same goes to you, hearing the other side will not be a problem for you if you are using this phone. No dropped calls so far and there is no death grip problem for this phone (have you heard of iPhone 4′s antennagate? ). Even when I am inside the elevator, the bar doesn’t drop much & I manage to surf internet inside the elevator  .

Sms function is standard. It is something like before. The only difference I see compared to my previous E71 is, Nokia have included “conversation” which is a bubble chat style sms where you can read all the previous conversations with the person in one page.

Multimedia features – camera, camcoder, music player, video playback

Music player is great. The sound quality is equal to some good quality music players in the market. Unfortunately, the built-in loudspeaker is not suitable to deliver good music. There is only 1 loudspeaker which is placed behind the phone (near the camera). When you place your phone on a table or on your bed, the sound can hardly be heard even if the volume of your ring tone is high. It is loud, but the speaker placement is wrong and can easily be blocked when you place your phone on the table or put it into your jeans pocket. Furthermore, Nokia N8 supports DOLBY sound. I am wondering why Nokia placed just a single speaker. Try using a good headset and you can really feel the quality of DOLBY surround sound.

The default handsfree given for Nokia N8 is not suitable if you want to enjoy a good quality music. So you may need to invest on a good quality music headset if you want to listen to music using your Nokia N8. With proper speaker/headset, the music quality is excellent.

Video playback is also good. Erm, not excellent but good. It can play HD videos in crystal clear quality. The 3.5″ screen is also quite big to watch movies etc while you are on the go. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support some popular codecs. When I tried playing some videos, I can only hear the sound but the video is not played. Well, this is not a big issue because I transfer my videos using Nokia Ovi Suite and for some of the videos, Nokia Ovi offers a convertion if it is incompatible to play in Nokia N8. I also have a problem where when I try to skip a scene from the video using the tab at the bottom, it either loads quite long or sometimes even says “memory full” and hangs. Is this a firmware bug? Hopefully it is, because some of these videos can easily be played in Samsung Omnia HD (i8910).

Now, let’s talk about the camera  . The most famous thing about the Nokia N8 is the camera. It is 12 Megapixel with Carl Zeiss. So what is so great about that? This phone comes with 1/1.83” sensor. Yes, it is a larger sensor compared to other camera phones. A bigger sensor gives you a higher quality pictures

I have nothing much to comment about the camera because I am not a photography expert. I am not going to show you photos and comparison because……I am not an expert  , but I personally feel that photos taken using Nokia N8 are very nice. There are less noise when the photos taken without flash or at a dark place. I also realised that the “night mode” is not much different compared to normal mode. Not sure why. When I used other Nokia phones, there is an obvious difference between normal mode and night mode but not for Nokia N8. Well, I am not really concern about this because Nokia N8′s flash is good enough to take superb quality photos in the night

There is another thing that I notice with N8′s photo where the colour is “gloomy”. I took a shot of my bike on a sunny day using my Nokia N8 and my 12 Megapixel Canon Ixus 105 camera. Photo taken via Nokia N8 looks dull like it is going to rain. Yeah, I understand that digicam has bigger sensor and I am not doing a comparison. It is just that I want to show how “unreal” is the photo taken using Nokia N8.

Well, I guess it is a firmware bug as well, or it got to do with the camera setting. I’ve set it to all standard for comparison purpose but you definitely need to change the ISO, exposure etc accordingly to get a good picture.

As for the video camera, it is good. I don’t have a disappointment except for the light. If you do a video shoot at night, your Nokia N8′s camera flash is less useful. It just have a constant red light which definitely makes close up videos look bad. I have no option to off that red light  . Overall, the video recording is good. The quality is great. You can record in High Definition (HD) MP4 format or normal MP4 format or 3GP format.

Display and connectivity

Nokia N8 comes with a excellent display. The photos viewed in the screen is good. The AMOLED screen really makes a difference. If I compare with other high end Nokia phones, the display in Nokia N8 is brighter and sharp.

As for connectivity, there is no problem with Nokia. As usual, the connectivity options are straight forward and easy. No hiccups found there. The Nokia N8 also supports charging via PC’s USB port. At the same time, you also have the option to charge your phone via a typical Nokia charger which is good as I can easily use my previous Nokia charger or borrow my friend’s charger if I forgot to bring mine. Nokia N8 also have mini HDMI port where you can connect your HDMI enabled LCD screen to your phone. This is especially useful when you want to play your HD videos on a larger screen. The quality is great. I enjoyed watching my movies in HD via my LCD TV screen. The quality is not compromised.

For those who do not have unlimited internet plans with your sim, you may want to be careful of the widgets as they can auto connect to the internet and finish up your money. There is a option to turn off the internet access to widgets, so no worries on that. The touch sensitivity is good except for internet browsing where it sometimes doesn’t click on the link.

I feel that the widgets are unnecessary. You can remove them but the customization of the screen is restricted e.g. you can’t set the size of a widget. The information shown by the widget is also too little for me to know the exact message the widget is trying to show e.g. a news widget.

There is 1 thing that I like about the connectivity. You can connect your USB thumb drive to your Nokia N8. Yes, there is a USB to Micro USB cable given in the box and it works like a charm. This is very important for me because I save a lot of documents into my thumb drive. Whenever I need to send some work related emails on the move, this option comes handy where I can easily attach those documents from my USB thumb drive. I’ve also tried playing some musics, videos and a few high resolution photos. It works well. It definitely took a little more time to open the photos from the thumb drive but there is no big issue. Songs played well and even videos were as good as how it will be if you store them in the phone’s memory itself. Great feature.

Web browsing, email, social networking and IM

I don’t find any major problems with web browsing. It loads almost any website. There may be some difficulty scrolling through some heavy content websites but overall it loads all my favourite sites. There was someone complaining that it can’t load Engadget website. That is a false review I would say because I can easily load the website without any problem. I am also using Opera Mini browser to save some bandwidth and it works well too. Overall I am happy with the browser. I know that Android OS and iOS have better browsers but I was using Blackberry before this. So I feel that Nokia N8′s browser is much much better compared to Blackberry OS5 browser. The only problem that I have with Nokia’s web browser and even Opera mini is, I can’t click on a link sometimes. I even try to zoom in to the max and click on the link but there is no response. Well, this just happens once in a while. It is not often, so I am still fine with that.

Email – this is where Nokia N8 fails miserably. It is nowhere near Blackberry browsing experience. I know that currently Blackberry is the King of mobile email but even previous versions of Nokia phones did better than Nokia N8. Let’s take Nokia E71 as a comparison. The Mail for Exchange in Nokia E71 was integrated with the messaging system. So whenever there is a new email, it will notify by a sound and also a notification light, in case you have missed the ring alert. For Nokia N8, it gives a ring alert too when there is a new email but there is no light indication as how it does for smses and missed calls. Even when I unlock the phone, there is nothing shown on the screen (no pop ups). For Nokia E71, even the Nokia Messaging software gives an notification light alert if you have missed the ring alert. I am quite disappointed with this.

Also, the older Nokia Messaging is something like Blackberry style where i go to http://email.nokia.com/ to set up my emails and then I can use my Nokia ID in my phone to load all my emails. Which means I do not need to set up my email one by one after the initial set up is done. This is not applicable for Nokia N8. So I have to set up my emails one by one. If I reset my phone, I have to re-configure the emails all over again.

The email system in Nokia N8 is also buggy where Gmail emails will not be delivered to your phone if you set it to “soonest”. The only option is to set your email retrieval to 15 minutes which is too long for me. This is a firmware issue and should be fixed in the next firmware release, I hope

Now, the good part about Nokia N8′s email system is, your can read your emails in HTML format. I know that Nokia had emails available in HTML even since before but you still can’t view your Microsoft Exchange email (e.g. your company email) in HTML previously. Now it is possible. Secondly, you can access your email’s inbox as well as draft, sent items and outbox folders which I find to be useful.

When it comes to Social Networking, 2 common names that you often hear will be Facebook and Twitter  . Well, Nokia N8 has it. Not bad, it is built in and you can easily read the time line and view your friend’s news feeds. If any of your friend’s birthday is coming, you can know via this app and if someone adds you in Facebook, this widget will indicate you too. The problem is, it is a widget. Yes, just a widget which shows you the timelines and feeds but it WILL NOT NOFIFY you. I enjoyed sms style notification which comes to your inbox whenever there is someone who adds you or @mention you (Twitter) etc. That is the only thing missing in this Nokia N8 social networking app. You can install 3rd party apps. I tried a few but not up to my expectation.

IM @ Instant Messaging. I really miss this feature. Yes, Nokia N8 doesn’t have any native IM software where you can chat with other using Yahoo! Messenger or Windows Live Messenger. I tried installing Nokia’s IM software from http://messaging.nokia.com/ but it says that Nokia N8 already has a built-in app. Owh, that is a good news for me. Looks like Nokia has taken out IM in this firmware due to some reasons but I believe it will be available in their next firmware update. At the moment, I have to use some 3rd party IM like Nimbuzz or eBuddy. I actually tried both and eBuddy was far much better than Nimbuzz. I felt that Nimbuzz is just too crappy. Nimbuzz doesn’t have notification sound (it just vibrates) when someone sends me IM. I checked the setting and everything was ok but I still don’t hear a notification tone when someone starts to chat with me.

As for eBuddy, everything was good but I can’t start up a chat. E.g. when someone chats with me (the person start 1st), I can click on the person’s name at chat box and then type a message. If I want to start a chat with someone, I can’t get the virtual keyboard appear no matter what I do. After exploring and checking what is the problem, I finally found out that if you tick the “type directly in chat screen” option in your setting, you will have that problem. So just untick it and everything will be fine. However, that is still a bug. It is buggy and they should fix it. Another thing with these 3rd party chat softwares is, they don’t have any pop ups to show that someone is chatting with you. I had this option when I used Nimbuzz in my Nokia E71 last time. If someone starts to chat with you and you have missed the ring tone for some reasons, you will know that these person is waiting for your reply until he or she sends another message or until you go back to those application to recheck. This is another minus point. I wish that Nokia’s native chat app have this feature.

Overall, Nokia N8 is not meant for this. It can’t do well in the aspect of email/social networking/IM. Web browsing is still good. Another thing that I want to mention here is, the integration is poor in Symbian phones even since before. In N8, you can connect your friend’s facebook account with your phone book but I expect for more than that. Have you used a Blackberry before? The integration between phone book and Facebook and Twitter and Messengers are perfect. That is how I wish Symbian’s integration could be.

Other features and softwares

GPS – Nokia’s Ovi maps does a good job (at least for my area). I can rely on the Ovi maps when I travel around. Symbian has an advantage compared to Android, iOS and Blackberry when it comes to navigation because Nokia has all the maps preinstalled. You do not need to download the maps from the server while navigating to your destination. It is very handy especially when you are not on a unlimited data plan or if your area has a poor internet coverage. For Nokia N8, you can also use Garmin maps. Some people prefer to use Garmin because the maps (in Malaysia) is frequently updated by a specific community. Because of that, your maps are reliable and you can highly depend on it for navigation. If both fails (which is unlikely to happen), you have the option of using Google maps. Yes, you can install Google maps and use it as an alternative for navigation and looking for places.

FM Transmitter – I don’t see a need for this. Well, it is a nice feature but the transmission frequency is very near. You will have problem listening to it if you are quite far away from the transmitting device (in this case, the Nokia N8). If you want to share songs using this method, might as well you open up the loudspeaker. Furthermore, when you use the FM transmitter, the receiver can’t hear the songs properly when there is an obstruction. If that happens, there will be an annoying cracking sound which defeats the purpose of the FM transmitter.

Widgets - I see a lot of widgets like Web TV, news, traffic etc. Not all are useful. You can download your preferred widgets from Ovi store and delete those that you find not to be useful to you.

Calendar – Same old calendar. No difference compared to previous Symbian versions. Unfortunately, integration is still not available. If I add a birthday information for one of my phone book contact, the calendar will not capture that info and show it.

Phone book – same as before. The only difference I can see is the Social Networking integration. No complaints about the phone book but I hope that the integration feature is improved.

Conclusion. What is my opinion?

Nokia N8 is a great phone in terms of multimedia capability. It is a great device for a person who loves to take photo or watch movie or listen to music. Unfortunately, it is not suitable for serious business and networking. It is far behind Android, iOS and Blackberry when it comes to email, social networking and integration. Go ahead buying it if your primary use of a phone is for its multimedia capability. If you are a business person or need to be connected always, Nokia N8 is not good enough.

In short, N8 is a multimedia gadget.