Video: Nokia N8 Review from Mobile Tech Review.

Here’s a review from the other side of the Pond, but a very fair and balanced one from Lisa at Mobile Tech Review (USA). They’ve slated Nokia and Symbian phones when necessary so it’s refreshing to hear about the good points coming from the new N8 and new Symbian^3.

• Perfect phone for travelers – PENTABAND world 3G phone
• 3 homescreen reminds of N900 – lots about it does and that’s a good thing
• CAMERA – the real show stopper – not just the highest rated megapixel phone in US but really DOES TAKE THE BEST PICTURES *cough*engadget*iPhone*
• Unique torpedo design – you either like it or you don’t
• Solidly built alumin(i)um casing –
• Ports fiddly, hard to pull off (and that’s about the HDMI, god knows, the memcard door is a puzzle and a half – maybe that’s just me, Lisa didn’t seem to mention problems with it here.)
• Symbian^3 looks a lot like Symbian of old in terms of icon styles, something you feel at home with.
• AMOLED Capacitive – very sharp, very vivid, very bright no complaints at all.
• Downloaded a few apps already, 5th ed apps work fine
• Music player – very apple like fashion – wonder what lawsuit’s gonna come up there
• REALLY LOUD, loud, loud speaker on this thing – it’s quite good quality.
• 256MB RAM, doesn’t sound like a super lot, Nokia and Symbian are very good on very little memory but it could stand to have more (lagging after 6 heavy apps apparently)
• Web browser tested over T-Mobile 3G – works just as well with a AT&t sim.
• Pinch zoom not quite as fast as iPhone and Android (we’d like to see a couple of updates)
• The rendering itself is quite beautiful, you can even see flash ads.
• Scrolling speed is good – no inertia scrolling (what, there’s no kinetic scrolling in browser? hmmm.)
• (Similarities are compared with N900 about the browser – I’m not sure if there’s confusion with N97*)
• All sorts of advanced HTML buttons work just fine.
• YouTube flash embedded – it’s pretty good actually.
• Photo Viewer quite fast  – 12MP camera images
• 720p Video – if you’re a photo buff, it’s definitely good.
• Video stabilization is very effective to prevent the bouncing in video.
• Frame Rate video playback is good, in sync with audio – pretty good for 680MHZ CPU (that’s because of that mega broadcom chip doing much of the Graphics Processing)
• Nokia’s Ovi Maps – much loved in Europes.
• Handy shortcuts on homescreen – no wandering through menu
• Readonably large phone but smaller than T-Mobile Vibrant and Captivate (though thicker).
• Nice presentation box.

[YOUTUBE=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3fDnv064NU]

*Happily, Symbian 3 isn’t just a reworking of the old OS to gloom on touch, as was the case with S60 5th Edition. The N8 reminds us of the very respectable Nokia N900 smartphone running Maemo: it’s designed from the ground up for touch, as as such it has a capacitive multi-touch display and no stylus.

Thanks to chfyfx for the heads up.

Tags: N8, Nokia, Nokia N8, Review, Symbian^3, T-Mobile, USA

Category: Nokia, Nseries, Symbian, Video