Three months ago Nokia announced that they will be introducing a new revolutionary phone to the multimedia cellphone market, and today I got the chance to have a hands-on with the soon to be released Nokia N8.
My initial impression was WOW, carved from a solid block of anodised aluminium the Nokia N8 has it in the bag when it comes to looks, sleek with curved edges and available in nice bright colours.
The Nokia N8 certainly means business when it comes to multimedia, the 12 megapixel wide-angle lens camera takes brilliant snapshots, even in low light conditions and through windows the quality of the pictures did not disappoint through the large 3.5″ AMOLED screen. The 12 megapixel camera also enables the N8 to records videos at 720p at 25 frames per second.
The one thing that really impressed me about the Nokia N8 was the fact that it had a mini-HDMI port, allowing you to just plug your N8 straight into your HD TV with the supplied HDMI cable to view all your photos and video in its full HD glory.
But wait, there’s more. Yes Nokia has decided that giving you 16GB internal memory is not enough, so they added this nice new feature that allows you to plug in a USB drive or stick into the N8 through the provided mini-USB to USB cable and allows you to transfer files between the phone and USB device or even play media directly from the USB device. What this basically means is you can use your Nokia N8 as a home multimedia device when combined with the HDMI out.
The N8 is also the fist phone that runs the all new Symbian 3, I must admit I have never been a huge fan of Symbian but must say that Symbian 3 really stack up against the likes of Android and IOS. Symbian 3 on the Nokia N8 has also reverted to a homescreen approach such as Android and Apple have done. The new Symbian gives you 3 homescreens to customise as you please with the options of adding widgets, folders and shortcuts.
Obviously the N8 is not all play, with support for exchange, Office and PDF documents it is certain to appeal to the business man with style also.
The Nokia N8 should be available early October in South Africa, and you can expect it to retail for about R5500. Nokia will also sell 1500 units from their Ringaz blog for those that really want to claim to be the first to own a Nokia N8 in South Africa.
Hey Gerhard
Thanks for a great blog
Just one thing… maybe I’m being silly here…. but when I click on a link that takes me directly to a post I don’t see any date for the post. So this review of the Nokia N8 could have happened in 2009 for all I know…
Am I missing something? Is my browser (Google Chrome on Mac Os 10.6) missing something?
Once again – thanks for all the relevant info about our fast expanding techno world
Hi Diederik, you are right the date is not displayed on the post page only on the homepage, I’ll add it to the post as well. Thanks for visiting my blog, glad to hear about readers enjoying it.
I’m a student => R5500 = :’(
I
What’s Symbian^3 like in terms of app development?
I’m an engineering student, so being able to have a mobile, high powered versatile plaform tha I can write apps for is… cool.
The company sponsoring me uses exchange hugely, and being from the mobile generation having that and the document solutions integrated sounds really awesome.
Plus, now I can put away the iPod for good and don’t need to be disappointed with low-res photos.
Sigh, OK, time to wake up now.
Thanks for the review!
People need to know that BB is not the be all and end all, far from it.