Nokia has had it rough lately. But with the feature-packed N8, the Finnish handset maker has finally earned a spot at the cool kids table.
Okay, so...maybe not at the head of the table.
The N8 delivers most of what we've come to expect from a flagship smartphone. The company's usual soft key-driven design has been ditched in favor of the eye-candy du jour—a bright 3.5-inch AMOLED touchscreen. The 640 x 360 resolution falls just shy of its dazzling competitors, but the N8 sports one of the best screens we've seen on a Nokia device (and does a solid job of video playback). With the screen eating up the majority of the 4.5 x 2.3 x 0.51-inch handset, the sides and top are populated with a host of buttons and ports: Mini-HDMI, mini-USB, hot-swappable microSD, 3.5mm headphone, and elegantly flushed volume and lock rockers. Though we were impressed by the image quality from the surprisingly sharp 12MP Carl Zeiss lens situated on the back, it distends a great deal and is somewhat of an eyesore. While the rest of the handset is relatively svelte (and light at 4.8 ounces), the protruding lens highjacks the profile and has a habit of getting stuck in pockets.
Powering Nokia's 'Great Grey Hope' is a smartly leveraged 680MHz processor. Our knee-jerk reaction was to groan at this sub-1GHz powerplant, but the N8 savvily pairs it with a load-bearing Broadcomm GPU. This division of labor bore a great deal of fruit; finger-whisking through the spanking new Symbian^3 OS home screens was mostly smooth, and recording and off-loading 720p video at 25fps hardly felt like heavy lifting. Even the N8's (comparatively lacking) 256MB of RAM didn't hold performance back as much as we were expecting. Switching apps on the fly was painless, and exposing the device to multitasking torture didn't produce a complete meltdown—at least not right away. Despite these admirable workhorse qualities, we feel like the N8 could've pushed the envelope a bit further. Just like the Droid and iPhone before it, the N8 experienced occasional lag while updating background processes like news and weather widgets. We suspect these hiccups could've been avoided with a little more horsepower, and quite frankly, we expect more from a 'throne-reclaiming' flagship device. As much as this irks us, we can't deny the N8's pragmatic appeal–between its decent call quality, responsive accelerometers, and light heft it's a great plain-vanilla phone.
Of course, crossing the finish line doesn't necessarily mean one made good time. It's clear Nokia engineered the N8 as a punchy, tightly-constructed competitor, but it easily falls shy of market leadership. In its current state, Symbian^3 OS resembles Android OS in some of its roughest stages, and though Nokia's navigation app is ahead of the curve with its locally-stored maps, the OVI App store as a whole leaves a lot to be desired. To be fair, these gripes could be resolved by a groundswell in Nokia's development community and a few OS updates. But between its non-subsidized pricing in the U.S. market and the passable-but-not-exemplary performance, we feel like this is more of a Hail Mary than a touchdown.
WIRED Anodized aluminum body easily makes this one of Nokia's sleekest designs. Ships with multimedia cables. Does a fantastic job at multimedia playback. Video chat-ready with a front-facing VGA camera. Mini-HDMI port pumps out video and Dolby Digital Plus audio. Some of the best (non-Google) navigation we've seen on a smartphone. Don't call it a comeback—Nokia's been here for years.
TIRED Competitive with the Pros (iPhone, Android, Windows 7), but clearly won't convert the entrenched. Non-removable battery = two steps back. Symbian^3 OS's lack of polish puts a hurt on quick navigation. Dual card bay (one for memory, one for sim) is a hassle to close.. No U.S. carrier subsidies or CDMA support will put a hurt on popularity. Don't call it a comeback! Nokia's been here for...years.