Nokia n8-part-3

Features

The Nokia N8 offers quad-band world roaming, a speakerphone, speed dial, conference calling, voice dialing, a vibrate mode, and text and multimedia messaging with threaded chat view. The phone's address book is only limited by the available memory, and the SIM card holds an additional 250 contacts. There's room in each entry for multiple phone numbers, work and home addresses, email addresses, birthday, and more vitals. For caller ID purposes, you can assign each contact a photo, a group ID, or a custom ringtone.

Unlike other operating systems, the N8 doesn't automatically pull and sync contact information from your various email accounts and social networking sites. It does so for Exchange, otherwise you have to use other tools, such as the Ovi service or an iSync plug-in, to get the rest of your contacts synced to the N8, which is annoying.

The N8 is compatible with multiple email protocols, including Exchange, Lotus Notes, and POP3/IMAP accounts, and offers HTML and folder support. We set up our Exchange and Gmail accounts, and we were able to receive and send email without problem. As we noted in the User Interface section, accessing options isn't always easy or obvious. For example, if you want to get to your folders, you need to tap the Inbox tab at the top of the screen and then choose Folders from the drop-down list. It's not the biggest of problems, but again, it goes back to the usability issue.

Wireless options are well-represented on the Nokia N8, with Bluetooth 3.0, Wi-Fi (802.11b/g/n), GPS, and five-band 3G support (WCDMA 850/900/1700/1900/2100). This means you'll get 3G whether you use AT&T or T-Mobile, which is great. The N8's WebKit-based browser is decent. It offers support for Flash Lite 4.0 and multiple windows, and it renders pages quite well. Navigation, however, could be much better. A simple task like entering a new Web address requires you to launch a separate menu, enter the URL, and then press Go To, and we think it really shouldn't be that complicated. (For more about the browser, check out Performance section).

The Nokia Nseries has always been known for its multimedia capabilities, and the N8 certainly continues that tradition and even does it better. With Symbian 3, the music player gets a nice makeover with a Cover Flow-like interface for browsing music. It offers basic functions, such as shuffle and repeat modes, on-the-fly playlist creations, and support for MP3, WMA, AAC, eAAC, eAAC+, AMR-NB, and AMR-WB music codecs. There's also an FM radio.

Hands down, the N8's best feature is its 12-megapixel camera. With Carl Zeiss optics, a Xenon flash, and numerous editing options, the N8 delivers some of the best picture quality we've seen from a camera phone. Images came out ultrasharp with vibrant and rich colors that showed details not visible on most photos taken by a phone. The camera was also able to handle shots taken in various environments--indoors, outdoors, action scenes--with very little problem.
In addition to photos, the camera can record HD video and once again, the quality is impressive. Unlike some other smartphones that offer HD video recording, the N8 produced clips that were clear without any type of haziness or yellowing. A preloaded video editor, as well as a photo editor, is available if you want to cut clips or add music and text, which you can then share on your HDTV via the HDMI port. There's also a front-facing VGA camera, which you can use to make video calls with apps like Fring.

Other apps preloaded on the N8 include the QuickOffice suite, a PDF reader, a ZIP manager, a voice recorder, a dedicated YouTube app, and Ovi Maps, which offers free turn-by-turn navigation. You can search and download more apps from the Ovi Store. The store's catalog consists of around 15,000 titles, which is a far cry from the 80,000 or so apps in the Android Market and 250,000 apps in iTunes, but Nokia has done a nice job of cleaning up the store's interface. The N8 offers 16GB of internal memory and an expansion slot that accepts up to 32GB cards.