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Anticipation builds for the Nokia N8 camera phone
WHILE IT HAS BEEN two months since Vodafone was running around telling the world plus dog that Nokia's 12 Megapixel smartphone was coming soon, there is no end of outfits trying to tease us.
The N8 boasts a 3.5-inch AMOLED touchscreen, 16GB of memory, GPS, Bluetooth, 3G and it runs Symbian^3 but it is the camera that has got everyone's attention.
Apparently it takes real pictures rather than the nonsense we usually get from phones and it can also record HD quality video.
Now it seems that T-Mobile UK is getting into the anticipation act, with the N8 showing up on its own teaser page.
However no one is certain of a date when Blighty punters will be able to pop into the shops and snap one up. At the moment all Vodafone and T-Mobile will let you do is pre-order and little else.
Word on the street is that Nokia's N8 smartphone will be available here in the UK some time in August, but that is just people guessing mostly. µ
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Its probably too expensive for me, but I dont understand what is wrong with the interface, my friend has a 5230 and it looks very nice to me.
There again I've not really seen anything other than an iPhone and I still prefer Windows XP to Windows 7.
I don't really see how anyone can still "anticipate" this Symbian crap. It's just a horrible OS that had it's peak and purpose long long ago.
Bring us a MeeGo N8 or drop dead Nokia.
(unfortunately they rather seem to do the later)
The hardware specs look great. I'm not 100% sure about the camera side of things, I have a 12mp DSLR, and no camera phone is going to beat that, especially in low light. In fact cramming more and more pixels onto a small camera phone sensor actually makes the low light performance worse. I thought Nokia had quite a sweat spot with the 5MP Carl Zeiss unit they had on the N95/N97. Just needed a real flash instead of the LEDs to make is a really killer camera phone.
As for the N8 and its feature list, maybe a couple of years ago I would have been a keen early adopter. Unfortunately however good the hardware list looks, Nokia have blown their chances with me. I bought an N97, which is not bad, but a year on still does not perform to expectations.
The ability to perform OTA firmware updates has made Nokia's quality control lazy. "Oh it doesn't matter, we can fix it in the next release" seems to have become their catch phrase.
Sure they've given away turn by turn sat nav, lovely, except the N97's GPS cannot keep track of your location at anything more than a walking pace... Like when you're driving. Resulting in being told to take the next exit on a motorway just as you've actually driven past it!
If that wasn't bad enough, if you try to be helpful and file fault reports, you just get the impression that the support team are just interested in ticking things off as solved when all you've told them is the work around you have found to overcome a problem. Unfortunately the only work around I have found for the GPS is to use an external bluetooth GPS unit.
Fed up yet? Wait, it gets worse... UK users have to wait for firmware releases. Even phones that are generic UK CV and not tied to a carrier have to wait. Nobody seems to know why! If you do have a carrier version you are really screwed. You'll be several releases of firmware behind.
The way round this is to void your warranty and change the model number. This at least lets you get the current firmware version. However talk of this is banned on the Nokia forums! Do they not realise how many people are walking about and cursing their N97s in the UK because they are stuck on a firmware version almost a year old?!
I personally have "hacked" 4 different N97s to a Euro model number and the owners have been overjoyed with the improvements later firmware versions have provided. They're still not perfect, but at least 90% of the features work now!
And me? Sorry Nokia, after a long long history together (3210, 6150, 6210, 6600, 7650, N70, N95, N97) I no longer have confidence in your products so I will be off to buy something else, probably before the contract on this N97 ends...