During Social Media Week in New York (Feb. 7-11th, 2011), I received a Nokia N8 straight from the company as a gift for being an active “tweeter” during related events. I later saw, I had something like a 67 page transcript from that week alone of tweets.
I digress.
Anyway, I was very pleased with the vibrate color of the phone. I like stylist gadgets the best. The model comes in 5 colors, mine was a nice vibrant blue (other colors are orange, silver, black, and lime green). The size of the phone and weight is perfect-not too big or heavy but not small and breakable feeling either.
My favorite quality of the phone; 12 mega pixel Carl Zeiss optics and Xenon flash. I used the phone’s camera feature to take photos at the closing party at District 36. With the 16gb of internal memory and expandable mini-SD card slot you definitely shouldn’t have to worry about storage issues either. All the photos I took came out great after I realized to remove the protective film off the lens (duh). The video quality is also good for web clips although the sound quality leaves much to be desired, but hey it’s a cell phone not a high quality video camera (it does come with simple movie editing software for upload right to YouTube, etc). Also I watched a couple full length movies on the phone, the sound is great since it features Dolby Digital Plus surround sound. Very good playback except for dark scenes in the movies. You can plug the device to your home theater system with an HDMI cable as well.
The Nokia N8 is a touch screen device with no key pad. I’m finally used to this feature since having a touch screen since June. It has swipe as well BUT you’re back to the 3 letters per key again. That is a fail to me.
It doesn’t get any better after that either. For me the OS makes or breaks a phone being hot or not and with the N8 you’re dealing with Symbian. Sorry not impressed. The screen also could be bigger, just a suggestion.
The lack of “cool” apps to chose from makes it a no go for being my main phone. I’m all about apps for phones now and there are certain ones I just need available, I couldn’t get any of those on this phone. Although Nokia’s site says “The Nokia N8 comes integrated with Qt, a software development environment that simplifies the development and makes it possible to build applications once and deploy across Symbian and other software platforms. Nokia has also made the simple to use Nokia Qt SDK available, in its initial beta, to enable developers to start realizing the potential of Qt.” This should help (I guess) the app offerings in the future.
Overall this would be a phone I would get a teenager (under 16) or my parents. I kinda think of it as a newer sidekick…cool looking, great camera, couple cool apps but leaving much to be desired in the end and something I’ll want to replace within a month.
I think of it now as a second phone used for just taking great Facebook or blog photos with and using when the battery dies on my main phone (battery is actually impressive too).
Overall, I’d say decent phone for someone who really just uses cellphone for basic functions, tweets a bit, updates Facebook page and likes to take photos or short videos for social media sites. I’m giving the phone a 5 out of 10 rating.
Thanks Nokia for the gift but I’m looking forward to you catching up with 2011 and going Android.
Note: My overseas friends love S40 operating system and Nokia phones plus today Foursquare just launched with Nokia so I applaud that. Bet this phone will do good internationally.
