The latest on smartphones (and other gadgets)

Having used the N8 for the past week I have figured out that there are three reasons, and only three, why you should consider getting Nokia’s new flagship phone. Of course if you already have an N8 you will know what I am talking about.

I raved about the hardware in a previous post, so I am not going to repeat mysefl. Suffice to say that it is a beautifully made phone.

But lets look at the reasons why you should not get one, or why, after only a week, I am no longer using my N8 (It is for sale by the way):

Symbian^3

The latest version of Symbian is better than the previous ones, but is still light years behind the competition (Android and iOS). The user interface is not nearly as slick and polished. It is still clunky in places. You still have to double-press in places and single-press in others. The browser still does not wrap the text to fit the screen when you zoom in. And it is not completely compatible with pre-Symbian^3 versions of third party software. Nor is it completely stable. I had lots of crashes, and after one of the restarts some rapidly changing blue numbers appeared in the top right corner of my screen, and stubbornly refused to leave. Resetting to factory settings got rid of it temporarily only. Eventually I gave up trying to remove the numbers which was ok while holding the phone in portrait mode as the numbers were in the top right corner, but when I flipped to the phone to landscape, the numbers appeared slap bang in the middle of the screen. I got the impression that the N8′s software needed more work.

I hope that MeeGo is going to finally get Nokia’s software to the level of Android and iOS, because Symbian ain’t gonna do it.

Text input

This is one phone that cries out for a qwerty. Yes, I know the E7 is coming. The on-screen keyboard entry is painful. Not nearly in the league of Android or iOS. If you get an N8 you absolutely have to get Swype. There isn’t a version available for the N8, but there is one for the C7. So, login to Ovi store on your PC, set your device to C7, locate Swype, then send the link to your phone. Unfortunately Swype only works in landscape mode on the N8, and the Swype keyboard takes too long to appear when you turn the phone from portrait to landscape, but it is still the best way to enter text.

Software on the phone

I think I have already complained about this in a previous post, but some of the software on the phone is plain crap. Especially the Quickoffice Adobe Reader. I found it impossible to read documents with this software. It is too slow to zoom in or out or scroll, and it doesn’t support kinetic scrolling, which means you have to somehow grab hold of the very thin scroll bars on the side of the image and try to drag them. Good luck with that. And then Quickoffice wanted money from me before it would let me view a Word document. What’s with that?

Social networking

Twittering and Facebooking on older Nokia phones like the N97, was rubbish. You had to resort to third party apps such as Gravity. Symbian^3′s social networking is a major improvement on that. There is now a single app that serves up Twitter and Facebook, which is good, but it provides no notifications of incoming tweets for example. Compare this with any one of a hundred free Twitter apps on the Android market, who will all provide you with background updates and notification, all displayed in the notification bar at the top of the screen on an Android phone. Different topic, but notifications in Symbian^3 is an inconsistent mishmash affair.

Calendar

Yes I know not many N8 users will be interested to know that the calendar does not have the ability to store/display meeting participants. E7 users may be interested in this though.

Nokia Mail

The new mail app is much better than the old built-in messaging app (the latter is still used for SMSs). It serves up reasonable looking HTML format emails, but I had on-going problems in downloading attachments. Sometimes the phone would wait minutes before starting a download.

OK, ok enough already. If you still want an N8, here are the three reasons to consider one:

Camera

The camera kicks ass with 12MP and a Carl Zeiss lens. Half-press the dedicated camera button and it locks the focus. It takes beautiful pictures and it takes them quickly. The only thing it lacks is optical zoom, but then so does every other cellphone camera, except for a nasty LG phone I saw the other day.

HDMI output

You can plug this phone straight into your HDMI equipped TV, which means you can watch videos and even youtube on your tv, streamed from your phone. This is seriously cool. The N8 is home entertainment system! Pity it doesn’t support all the popular video formats. It doesn’t do xvid or divx, go figure. The Samsung Galaxy S does. More about this phone in future posts.

Price

The third and final reason to consider getting an N8, is if you can get for free it may be worth it. If you going to have pay for it though, you can spend your money better.

There you have it, three reasons to get an N8. Actually there is a fourth reason – it is very good for playing games, and I mean 3D games like Need for Speed and Avatar – but I didn’t feel like changing the title of my post.