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Nokia N8: Something Innately Good About It
Prasad Naik, Apr 29, 2010 1300 hrs ISTExcellent hardware and superb pricing. But will that be enough?
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Amidst all the news about the iPhone and Android phones, people seem to have forgotten about Nokia, the world's largest manufacturer of mobile phones, as far as sales are concerned. But there is a reason for that. While all the other manufacturers were bringing innovative new products to the market; with great design, user friendly interface and rich features and functionality, Nokia didn't quite seem to keep up and so slowly began to escape the news.
None of their recent phone launches made people sit up and take notice. However, their recent announcement of the N8 seems to be doing that. Armed with a bevy of features, the new Nokia N8 comes with an enviable specifications list. But its not just the specifications that make the N8 an important product. The phone also brings several new never seen before features for a Nokia phone, such as a 12 megapixel camera with xenon flash, 720p/25fps video recording, multi-touch capacitive OLED touchscreen, HDMI-out, anodized aluminum body, Wi-Fi 802.11n and Bluetooth v3.0, among others. But perhaps one of the most important features is the operating system - Symbian^3 - which makes the Nokia N8 the first device to flaunt this OS. Today we take a look at some of these features in detail of what is perhaps the most important device for Nokia in years.
The Design
The Nokia N8 has a mono-block design, but for the first time Nokia has used anodized aluminum in its design. So far they had restricted themselves to using steel when it came to embellishing their phones with metal, but for the N8 their metal of choice was a bit more up market. The aluminum will give the phone a rich feel and along with making it sturdy, also reduce the weight, which for a phone with so many features, is bound to be on the higher side.
The design of the phone is fairly simple but still quite good looking and definitely better than what Nokia usually comes up with. The phone looks sleek and sturdy, with curved sides and top and bottom, which gradually become narrow towards the edges. The top and bottom sides are completely flat and house all sorts of buttons and ports, from the 3.5mm headphone jack to the all important HDMI-out. The design of the N8 reminded me of the Sony Ericsson Aino though.
The Display
The Nokia N8 has a 3.5", 640 x 360 pixel, AMOLED display. The touchscreen employs the capacitive technology. Nokia has so far used a capacitive display only on the X6 but what they haven't used so far is multi-touch technology, a feat made possible by the new Symbian^3 OS that the phone sports. The display is capable of displaying up to 16.7 million colors and has a proximity sensor for automatically turning off when you bring it close to your face during a call. An ambient light sensor is also available for automatically adjusting the brightness level. Nokia phones usually come with excellent displays and we expect the N8 to be just as good, if not better. Also, despite the fact that it is capacitive, Nokia will be supplying a special stylus for certain markets such as China, where handwriting recognition is used a lot.
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