75

As low as

$239
get price alerts
Nokia N8
9.0
final rating

reviewed on
purchased on
this review has been viewed 144 times

Criteria Comments Rating
  • Reception and call quality Nothing beats Nokia's phone in term of reception and call quality great!
  • Display For sun light usage, the AMOLED is awesome great!
  • Battery life The battery life is fair. I have a mix experience with it. Sometime it lasts long but on heavy Internet usage, the battery drains too fast good
  • Camera No comments —
  • Ease of use Symbian is symbian. SO if you use it before, a lot of familiarity. For first time user with Symbian, it's going to be difficult and frustrating some time good
  • Design and form factor It is a piece of art :) Design is great great!
  • Portability (size / weight) Super portable for a full PDA phone great!
  • Media support Music is awesome. Pictures is the greatest. Video is okay as long as it is converted to the right size good
  • Durability Very sturdy and solid. Great durability great!
  • Ecosystem (apps, accessories, etc.) I'm not going to lie here the software ecosystem needs work. It's getting better over time but you have to be really patient. The recent added Skype helps poor
Detailed review
So no doubt Nokia created one of a great hardware. After several half baked models (I meant N97s), I think this time they finally have the hardware right. Great form factor and quality for a phone. Awesome built-in camera. With most reviews out there, I tend to agree with the short comings on the Symbian OS. It is always difficult when you try to balance between maintaining user familiarity (and Nokia user based is enormous) and modern user interface. I think for the effort, I give them an A but comparing to modern OS such as iOS and Android, it won't convert new users from those camps. This is the same situation that I see with Blackberry OS. The OS 6 does evolves really well but it still quite slow (similar to Symbian).

However, the improvements are coming and coming very steady. The new apps introduced (such as Skype for N8) are making the phone better every day. The good thing about Nokia phone (or what it used to be) is you invest for long term. Your phone won't be out of date for a while (at least you can enjoy your phone for up to 2 years before it becomes obsolete). Nokia has been very generous with phone updates and take care the customers that way.

So despite all the lacking, I still give this gadget high mark for what it is. If you are looking for a solid phone with excellent camera and a little bit of "smart" at reasonable price, then this phone is an absolute choice. But if you are looking for all the "smart" and not really care about the phone, then go ahead and pick either iPhone or one of the Androids.