Yes I Can!

Nokia N8 Technical Details
LinkShare Referral Program

LinkShare Referral Program
The Nokia N8 is the most exciting Nokia phone we’ve seen all year, and one of the most exciting camera phone we’ve seen — ever! Want to know more? Read on for a full features exploration.

Symbian^3 – the operating system
At the heart of the Nokia N8, turning its cogs and working its bright lights, is Symbian^3. The ages-old OS has been treading water for years now, but Symbian^3 promises to bring it into the now. It has staunch competition to deal with — Android 2.2 being its biggest rival — but early signs are looking good.

The capacitive scren will give the Nokia N8 a slick feel and Symbian^3 uses widgets to make your home screens fully customisable. You can shove whatever you like on your home screen — from clocks and weather reports to Twitter feeds and RRS news updates. But will it feel as good as Android? Stay tuned for the review to find out.

12-megapixel camera
Here’s the big one. The Nokia N8 probably has the best mobile phone camera ever made. Ever. As has been said many times before, it’s not all about the megapixels. What gets us more excited about the Nokia N8’s snapper is its extra-large sensor. At 1/1.83″, it’s the biggest sensor seen in a mobile phone. It even beats some dedicated compact cameras.

This should offer better image quality than you’ve seen before in a camera phone, while the Xenon flash gives more even lighting than an LED alternative. 720p video recording is in too. If you want one singlular reason to buy the Nokia N8, it’s the camera. Simple as that.

Screen
Nokia’s Nseries held onto resistive touchscreens for way too long. The Nokia N900 used one, as did the Nokia N97 Mini. Thankfully, the Nokia N8 uses a capacitive screen, as used in other top-range smartphones like the iPhone 4 and HTC Desire.

It’s a 3.5-inch screen that uses the same high-quality AMOLED tech used in the fab HTC Legend. This offers better contrast and colour reproduction than TFT rivals, including — wait for it — the iPhone 4. It doesn’t have the iPhone 4’s pixel density, but what do you prefer, picture quality or image sharpness?

Power and memory
The Nokia N8 leaves most Android rivals eating dust in memory terms. With 16GB of internal memory as standard, you’ll have enough for thousands of songs plus a couple of movies on top. This is one multimedia-friendly phone.

The engine, or CPU, isn’t quite as impressive, but it’s all about how the power’s used, not how much is in there. The Nokia N8 uses an ARM 11 680MHz CPU, with a hardware graphics accelerator. It doesn’t sound quite as beefy as the Samsung Galaxy S’s 1GHz processor, but we’ll wait for our hands-on test before making any judgements. Software optimisation can often give better results than raw power alone.

The bod
The Nokia N8’s body is coated with metal, for that robust feel we loved in the Google Nexus One. It’s still light though — at 135g it’s a similar weight to the HTC Desire. Just 12mm thick, it’s no more portly than its rivals too, which is an unusual change for Nokia. Its Nseries devices have traditionally been on the chunky side.

The Nokia N8 comes in a handful of colours, including black/dark grey, silver, green, orange and blue.

Video skills
Given the amount of raw power that many smartphones have access to, its sad to see how few of them pack-in real video potential. The Nokia N8 has its video skills down, like a pro. Its list of supported codecs is fab, with DivX, XviD, H.263, H.264, MP4 and WMV on-board, and — here’s the golden egg — it has an HDMI output, so you can watch your Nokia N8’s videos on your TV, without faffing about with Wi-Fi streaming or memory cards.