The Nokia N8 is an amazing mobile device, that's nearly unusable thanks to its interface. The phone is a perfect display of Nokia's strengths and weaknesses: stellar hardware, combined with an OS that appears to have been designed ten years ago.
First, let's get one thing straight: I write reviews that help U.S. consumers choose cell phones. Outside the U.S., the N8 has a very different profile—it will be available for much less money, and people in those countries are more familiar with Symbian's awkward gyrations. Sorry, guys, I'm not writing for you. This review is for the U.S. consumer, who has excellent Apple, Android, Palm, and now even Microsoft options available for less than $200 with a contract at a local carrier store. Meanwhile, the Nokia N8, with its bizarre interface is only sold unlocked, for $549, on the Web.
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Nokia N8 : Front
Nokia N8 : Horizontal
Nokia N8 : Back
Nokia N8 : Left
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The N8 is somewhat irrelevant to the U.S. market. It probably won't be picked up by a carrier, and not many handsets will likely be sold here. So I'll be a little more creative than usual here. I didn't go through our full suite of lab testing with the N8—instead, I lived with the phone for a week and a half, putting it through its regular-use paces—after that week and a half, I put my SIM card in a Samsung Galaxy S phone and breathed a profound sigh of relief.
Specifications
Service Provider
AT&T, T-Mobile
Operating System
Symbian OS
Screen Size
3.5 inches
Screen Details
640-by-360, 16.7M-color capacitive touch screen
Camera
Yes
Network
GSM, UMTS
Bands
850, 900, 1800, 1900, 2100, 1700
High-Speed Data
GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, HSDPA
Processor Speed
624 MHz
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The Good News: Great Camera, Great-Sounding Phone
The Nokia N8 is one of the best voice phones, and probably the best camera phone, I've ever used. It's a rare "everyband" phone, and works at 3G speeds on both AT&T and T-Mobile. Just pop in your SIM card, and it auto-configures itself for the right network. Signal reception is spectacular, and calls sound absolutely crystal clear. Apple's stable of Keystone Kops RF engineers should be taking this phone apart right now to learn its secrets.
The N8's 12-megapixel camera is fantastic for a camera phone. Images are heartbreaking in their clarity and ideal in their color balance. Even the Xenon flash is bright enough. The shutter isn't instantaneous, but it shows less lag than most camera phones. The N8 records HD video and outputs its entire interface to TV screens via an HDMI cable—no annoying DRM here to prevent you from watching your videos on a big screen. There's a front-facing camera, but I found it much less useful. My wife described a video recorded with the front-facing camera on the N8 as "three dancing pixels."
The processor feels snappy—the N8 played XVID-encoded episodes of "Burn Notice" beautifully on its 3.5-inch, 640-by-360-pixel screen. Video playback is definitely a speciality here, with wide codec and format support that even includes MKV files.
This awe-inspiring voice and image performance is wrapped up in a sleek body, a metal torpedo that comes in green, blue, orange, gray, or dark gray. The screen is made of practically scratch-proof Gorilla Glass. There are flaws, though: the battery is non-removable, so it's a good thing the N8 has terrific battery life (unless you're trying to push Microsoft Exchange e-mail, which cuts life to half a day.) The camera lens forms an unfortunate squarish bump on the back that could catch on pockets, and the memory card and SIM card slot doors are a bit sticky. Overall, though, the phone looks and feels elegant.
Before you go ahead and get the N8 to taunt your iPhone-owning friends with clear, non-dropping phone calls, though, read on.
Stop Symbian Before It Loads Again!
Symbian, on touch screens, is a total disaster. I used to love Symbian, and I still do, on non-touchscreen phones. Symbian's interface isn't designed for touch-screen use.
Everything about the N8's software is bad. I can't find a good thing to say. When I reviewed the Sony Ericsson Vivaz (1.5 stars), I called it the worst smartphone in America, and I blamed Sony Ericsson for the terrible software. Actually, it's Symbian's fault.
We've been tiptoeing around this problem for more than a year. Look at our reviews of the Nokia N97 Mini (3 stars) and the Nokia X6 (3 stars), for instance. Symbian phones are now designed solely for people who previously owned Symbian phones, because the interface just doesn't make sense to anyone else.
For instance: Text entry. The N8's landscape-format virtual keyboard defaults to turning off predictive text and autocorrect (they can only be turned on via buried menu options), and the phone doesn't even have a portrait QWERTY keyboard. In portrait mode, you're triple-tapping on a T9 number pad like it's 1998. That landscape keyboard, by the way, takes up the whole screen, obscuring what you're typing into.
To go to a new Web page in a touch-screen mobile browser, you typically swipe to the top and enter something in the address bar. Not here! It takes four clicks through unintuitive, nested menus to open a new page.
Also, the N8's music player took a long time to scan my memory card for songs in my tests. That made the software feel stale, even though it looks good, sounds good, and displays album art well.
Ovi Maps Navigation gives N8 owners free turn-by-turn driving and walking directions, along with attractively detailed maps and lots of ancillary content from big-name partners like Lonely Planet. So far, so good. But I couldn't figure out how to set the start point to anywhere other than my current location. I later found out that you have to tap on a location and then click "add to route" —it's doable, just not intuitive, like so much in Symbian.
Wow, does Symbian love folders. Nesting folders on a non-touchscreen phone makes a lot of sense, because it takes a lot of clicks to get through a long menu. But when you can scroll a long distance with just a flick of your finger, hiding options multiple taps deep is just frustrating.
Everything seems to involve more clicks than necessary. Take adding an app shortcut to the home screen. I couldn't figure this out initially, because if you click on the home screen and add "Shortcuts," you get a preprogrammed shortcut bar with no obvious way to change its contents. Instead you have to click the bar you've added again, pick "Settings," choose one of the four shortcut slots from a separate text list, pick "Application," and then choose what you want. It gets the job done—in the most awkward, unintuitive way possible.
The hideous software even damages the N8's two positive experiences. Where most of the rest of the smartphone world is working hard on multiple address book integration, the N8 syncs one, and only one, at a time. I could get my Microsoft Exchange contacts, but not my Facebook, Google, Twitter, or Yahoo address books. You can append Facebook and Twitter information to individual contacts, but you have to enter them one at a time, using an interface with several steps per contact. That's just a no-go.
The camera app, meanwhile, has trouble turning off. I sometimes had to stab an unresponsive touch button several times to quit the camera.
Nokia has sped up considerably and smoothed-out login problems in its Ovi app store, but there's still very little in there that anyone would want to download. I typed in two dozen popular American Web brands and content providers and came up with only a few apps. Want to enjoy media? There's no Netflix, no Pandora, no Slacker Radio. Nokia offers three proprietary Web TV channels, which are outdone by any carrier's MobiTV lineup. (And no, MobiTV is not available.)
Nokia's own TV commercial for the N8 shows how unaware the company seems to be. The commercial calls out as top features "three home screens" (competitors all have more), Ovi Store (without U.S. content), and Symbian^3, which is meaningless to Americans.
I could go on like this for a while, but you get the point. The touch-screen smartphone world has a consensus on the way some things should work. If you're going to buck that trend, you need a radically usable new idea. Symbian^3 brings a 2004-era, non-touchscreen interface awkwardly translated onto a high-end touchscreen phone. It's infuriating.
If the rating on a review was just about features, the Nokia N8 would get much higher than a 2.5. But I wanted to throw this phone through a window, it was so frustrating to use. Nokia says about the N8, "it's not technology, it's what you do with it." The company needs to take their own words to heart. If you don't make your $549, super-smartphone usable, nobody will want to do anything with it at all.
