I posted a couple of times about the N8 while I had it on phonetrial from Three (see moblogging from the N8 and Nokia N8 dealbreaker), but I thought it would be good to do a round up review much as I did for the HTC Desire HD.
S’funny. I love Nokia phones. I love the quality of the build, the way they feel, how they look. I don’t honestly think that you can beat the range they have in terms of different phones for different users – you’ve got the N8 which is a top quality camera phone, or phones with qwerty keyboards either slide out or full frontal as it were, right the way through to your basic make a call mobile. And they tend to be very nicely put together.
But I haven’t managed to find a Nokia phone that I can love unequivocally. Obviously with every bit of kit there is going there will be drawbacks – often battery life is a big problem with smart phones. But with Nokia it’s all sorts of fiddly little quirks about software. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, the software lets them down.
The apps that you can get just don’t stand up to those in the Android market. I can switch on my HTC Wildfire and choose from an array of twitter apps and they’ll all do much what I want to do, while the Nokia versions will be under featured and over pretty.
Sadly though, it’s not just the apps. The actual OS is glitchy too, forcing you round in circles when doing things like managing connections. So if you’re attached to a Three all you can eat data plan, as this trial version was, you won’t suffer too much as you’ll just keep on surfing. If though you want to use wifi for a bit, maybe to do speedier software updates, or because you *aren’t* on Three and you have limited data, you will face a battle to get the phone to stay connected, particularly as you swap in and out of applications. This says to me that something just isn’t quite prioritised right in the connection handling, but wade through the settings as I could and did, I just couldn’t fix it.
Which all means that much as I adore the camera capability of the N8, I just can’t justify it as a tool in my day to day life.
I want to. I really want to. How would you not want to have a camera that can take pics like this:
or this
or even my Silent Sunday bubble pic?
How can you not want to have that in your pocket to grab any and every chance of a picture, and double as a phone? But although I’ve agonised over it, and believe me, I really have, the downsides of the apps just tip me against it. So if you aren’t a heavy blogger or tweeter, and you just want something that will keep you in touch online, while allowing you to take fantastic pictures, you can’t go wrong with the N8. It just isn’t quite the phone for me. I live in hope that the perfect Nokia is out there though and one day we will get the chance to live happily ever after 😉
I was loaned the N8 by the lovely ppl at ThreeUK for the purposes of review.
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