The N8 – ‘A Beauty’ … ‘A Beast’

I finally had my hands on this much waited beauty, the Nokia N8. The first handset to sport the new Symbian^3 OS and I've been spending some quality time with this beast over the past three weeks.

I call this a 'beauty' simply because of it's built quality. The anodized aluminium casing gives the handset a classy look. Hardware wise it's a beast - 680MHz processor coupled with a 3D Graphics Hardware Accelerator, built in 16GB of internal memory, 256MB RAM and 512MB ROM, microSD slot for memory expansion of up to 32GB. If I am not mistaken, the N8 has the largest camera sensor ever seen on a mobile phone to-date. And it's world’s first pentaband handset, which means you can use the device globally.

The size and the shape of the phone gives a good grip of the device and allows me to reach ma thumb across the 3.5" capacitive touchscreen with ease. The And I must say that the responsiveness of the touchscreen is excellent, I mean second to non. And the kinetic scrolling and pinch zoom make navigating the device a pleasure. But I should say that Nokia could have done better with the phone’s virtual keypad, especially portrait view. Coz you are forced to use a standard alpha-numeric keypad. If Jan-Ole, the developer of Gravity can do it for his Symbian^3 version of the Twitter Client, why couldn’t Nokia do it? I wish Nokia copies the Gravity keyboard layout and include it in the next firmware update *fingers crossed*

I will pick out one interesting feature on the N8 to give you a flavour of what you can do with it.

The Camera

The N8 comes with a 12 megapixel resolution, mechanical shutter, Carl Zeiss lens with auto-focus, and powerful Xenon flash. To give you an idea of how powerful the flash is, I shoot two pictures one with flash switched-off and the other with flash switched, on a moonless night. Here I go…

The Photos taken with the N8 appear clear and life-like, and could easily pass as coming from a DigiCam. The device also sports a two-stage shutter button, so you can lock down focus and exposure at half-press before snapping a picture.

The N8 can shoot 720p HD (high definition) videos at 25fps (frames per second) Wonder why Nokia capped it at that rate, when most of the high-end phones have 30fps?

I will be reviewing each and every feature on the N8 which I think is interesting in the coming weeks, so please keep an eye on ma site and follow me on Twitter for my tweets. Nearly forgot to mention my Twitter ID, and that’s mack005.

About the Author

Shazly Makeen (AKA Mack005) is a smartphone enthusiast who works during the day as an IT Exec. Mobile tech Editor at WoMLanka.com, which covers all things related to Symbian & Maemo/MeeGo. He is an iconic character within Sri Lankan Twitter community, and you can follow him on Twitter via @Mack005 Shazly wrote this guest post on my invitation as a favor for those of you are looking forward to buy a Nokia N8 phone in Sri Lanka