I remember one of the first mobile phones I ever used being a Nokia 5110i. It was among Nokia’s earliest of devices that packed an easy to use and straightforward interface in a supremely well-built package. Since we didn’t have as many phone launches each month back then as there are stars in the sky, the 5110i served me very well for more than 3 years without showing any signs of aging. That was in the mid to late 90’s.

Fast forward to the end of this decade and we see Nokia’s current flagship, the N8-00, continuing to hold on to the Nokia tradition of building what are arguably some of the best constructed mobile devices on the market. In fact in many ways, with the Nokia N8-00 (referred to as the N8 from here on) it seems as though Nokia has let its hardware and industrial design teams have a field day; this phone feels almost over engineered when held in your hands. While the current flagship demonstrates Nokia’s engineering prowess quite well, previous models seemed to epitomize what I felt was the company’s philosophy; build the software around the hardware. This worked just perfectly for as long as mobile phones were just that, devices used to make and receive calls and/or texts.

Sometime in the last decade, Apple, Google, Palm and Microsoft redefined mobile experiences, and as a result old flaws have slowly become gaping holes in the Finnish device manufacturer’s proverbial armor. 

The N8’s 12MP centerpiece

As I had briefly mentioned earlier, the Nokia N8 has what is probably the best camera to make home in a mobile phone. And Nokia is making no bones in letting people know about this. While Apple may talk about letting in more photons with a backside illuminated sensor, Nokia has actually gone ahead and done something about it—both with the optics and sensor size. At the heart of the N8’s camera is a 1/1.83” sensor which is in fact larger than most point and shoot cameras (which often carry sensors ranging from 1/2.3 – 1/2.5” in size) that are currently available. While a large sensor can’t do much by itself, Carl Zeiss has provided a decent 28mm equivalent lens that makes good of the sensor, given the tight confines and dimensional restrictions of a mobile phone.  In fact, much of the N8’s physical profile is dictated by that optical system.

Just to drive home the point as to how serious it is about the N8 as an imaging device, Nokia has equipped the phone with a real xenon flash (and an AF-assist lamp in the same housing) along with an active neutral density filter that automatically slides in place if you were to try and take pictures with a lot of bright light in it. This combined with features such as face detection and video stabilization (not image) make the N8 a reasonably good replacement to most entry-level point and shoot cameras currently available. The N8 could pull off pretty good shots without much issue in all but the poorest of lighting conditions. In poorly-lit scenarios, the N8 succumbs to its camera phone roots and produces visibly noisy pictures that lack detail. Pulling down the ISO manually and using a tripod would help, but this IS a phone after all.

I haven’t been able to pull up a guide number for the xenon flash, but suffice to say that it is an order of magnitude better than the LED/dual-LED flash found in most phones. Also, since the N8 lacks a motorized lens, it has a digital-only zoom which Nokia has consciously restricted to 2x for still photos and 3x for videos for the sake of maintaining image quality. The average size of a 4000x3000 pixel (12MP) image taken by the N8 is about 2.4MB which means it is compressed a fair bit. When set to “Close Up” mode the N8 can focus on objects as close as 3”.

Shots with the N8’s brilliant 12MP camera. The gallery has more camera shots.

Speaking of video, the N8 can record 720p video at 25fps with stereo sound. The N8 has 2 mics; one next to the camera module and another on the front of the phone. In test, the N8 could capture pretty decent audio even in moderately noisy and windy environments. It looks like the positioning of the mics and the noise cancellation algorithms together are doing a decent job of cutting out the background noise. In use, the N8 captured 720p video at an average bit rate of about 10 Mbps in the H.264/AVC format. The N8 makes use of something called an active hyperfocal system to maintain focus between about 60cm to infinity, without having to use a continuous focusing system. To describe this in a little more detail without diving too deep, the hyperfocal length of a lens is a measure of some distance at which, if the lens is focused, everything from a particular point (60cm in case of the N8) to infinity will be in complete focus. In the N8, the camera and software adjust the position of the lens if needed, to maintain this hyperfocal length and hence the “active” moniker. Because of this, the N8 can make do without hefty auto-focusing motors and deliver good focusing performance.

The camera interface itself is pretty straightforward and easy to use. You can easily change the captured image resolution, white balance, color tone, flash, scene mode and ISO options. There are quite a few still photo and video editing options available on the phone and the N8 seems to do a reasonably quick job of post processing. The one thing that I found quite annoying, was having to make all edits in one go on the N8. You cannot “save” a project as such; you have to make all your edits at once and save the file.

In-phone editing options on the N8

The N8 does not support panorama shots out of the box and I found this a bit surprising. Only when I casually dug through the Ovi Store did I find the “Panorama” app by Nokia.

Why this isn’t included from the get go or even pointed to by a link somewhere beats me. Either way, the panorama app does its job without any issues, although I must say I had to read the help section to try and understand how to get it working; not the most straightforward implementation for taking panorama shots. As with most camera phones now-a-days, the N8 also supports geo-tagging photos and videos. At the end of it, the one thing that’s blatantly clear is that the camera on the N8 is not a checkbox feature. It really is a well-engineered piece of hardware that Nokia seems to have integrated very well with the N8, instead of just tacking it on as an after-thought.

Look who’s calling the shots…

The N8 represents many firsts for Nokia. It is the first phone to be based on the Symbian^3 platform. It is the first Nokia phone to carry a 12MP camera sensor. It is also the first Nokia phone to have a discrete GPU. And finally, it is the first mainstream Nokia phone to be multi-touch capable (and just the 2nd to have a capacitive screen) and have a GPU accelerated UI, both of which are as a result of switching to Symbian^3. And when it comes to the display and what’s driving it, the Nokia N8 doesn’t disappoint.

  
NFS Shift HD running on the BMC2727 in the Nokia N8

While I’ll get to the biggest change in the N8 that is the Symbian^3 OS in a while, Nokia has also updated what’s calling the shots behind the scenes. Up until Symbian^3 came along, Nokia rarely ever bothered with including a GPU in its phones and even when it did, it was never really put to any good use. Its last N-Series flagship, the N97, didn’t even have a GPU per se. Except for the Cortex A8-touting outlier that the N900 is, the best that Nokia has done in terms of integrating GPU’s into phones is make use of the OMAP 2420 SoC, which included a PowerVR MBX GPU, in a handful of its previous devices and even this was left mostly unutilized. Things have changed, for the better, with the Nokia N8. Although Nokia is still sticking with a tried and tested ARM 11 implementation for its CPU, it has actually gone ahead and made full use of a discrete Broadcom BCM2727 Multimedia processor for graphic duties. While you can see performance numbers later in the review, the general impression is that it is fairly competent as a GPU.

The BCM2727 Block Diagram

Nokia’s choice of using an aged ARM 11 implementation, down-clocked to 680 Mhz (instead of the spec’d 772 Mhz) for its CPU may draw criticism in this day and age of gigahertz-capable, multi-core mobile SoC’s. But digging a little deeper seems to show that there may be some method to this madness. You see, pretty much everything in the N8 runs around the BCM2727 media processor. I would hazard a calculated guess that apart from lightweight low-level OS functions and interfacing with the baseband and other radio’s, there isn’t much else for the CPU to do on the N8. Plus, Symbian’s inherently efficient use of available resources helps too.

So what was needed in this case was a low-power, package efficient CPU design that could just about get the job done while sipping as little power and occupying as little space as possible. And this is almost exactly what Nokia found in the Samsung K5WXXXXXXX series of Fusion Memory MCP’s. This MCP (Multi Chip Package) allows Samsung to stack different memory types (DDR, NAND etc.) along with non-memory logic in the same low-power package. So for basically the same footprint as a single memory chip, Samsung is able to integrate the DDR memory (256MB), NAND (512MB) and a CPU (TI ARM11 applications processor).

Most of the heavy lifting in the N8 is done by the BCM2727, as it renders the Symbian^3 UI and games alike, works with the camera module to capture and process 12MP stills and 720p videos, encodes/decodes those videos, drives the HDMI output (upto 720p) and even decodes the audio. So in case of the N8 and Symbian^3, it made sense for Nokia to have a low-power ARM11 CPU coupled with a reasonably powerful and competent multimedia processor. Using an A8 Cortex-based 1Ghz+ part here to run Symbian^3 would have been overkill and power-inefficient. And this decision is quite obvious when you use the N8. The UI is very fluid and responsive with crisp transitions and swift app switching. Furthermore, the N8 posted very competitive battery life numbers to further substantiate Nokia’s decision here.

HTPC in your pocket?

So while the GPU in the N8 is competent, the display it drives is quite up to the task itself. Nokia is making use of a 3.5” AMOLED panel, running a resolution of 640x360 pixels. While certainly not the highest in terms of pixel density, it is vibrant and crisp with good contrast. The AMOLED panel on the N8 is very good and surprisingly, it actually uses a regular RGB sub-pixel grid, unlike the Pentile configuration found in most other AMOLED displays. This makes the display, in general, sharper than other AMOLED’s, especially when viewing text. 

  
N8’s visibility outside is decent (left), but nothing great.

It has very good visibility indoors and decent visibility outdoors—especially for being an AMOLED display—but still isn’t quite as good as some regular LCD displays. Even though the N8 is Nokia’s current flagship device, it doesn’t have the outdoor-visibility enhancing ‘Clear Black Display’ technology (aka polarizing filter). The ambient light sensor does its job very well and adjusts the brightness within a second or two of change in the lighting conditions. It also does a good job of maxing-out the brightness when outdoors under sunlight, although it doesn’t seem to want to dip to the other end when in complete darkness.

The N8 excels as a camera and as a phone. But another area where it does quite well for itself is multimedia. There is another first for the N8; it is the first mobile device to sport a complete implementation of the Dolby Digital Plus standard. What this means is that the N8 is capable of streaming out 5.1 audio without any issues. 

Third time’s the charm

As mentioned earlier in the review, the N8 is Nokia’s first device to be based on the new Symbian^3 platform. Before we dive into Symbian^3 and how it works and what new features it brings along, let’s have a quick look at Symbian’s evolution in the recent years.  

Evolution of Symbian; S60 1st Edition, S60 3rd Edition, Symbian^3 (L-R)

Although Symbian can trace its roots back to the 90’s and the days of Psion (known as EPOC OS back then), Symbian as we know it today only took shape earlier this decade with Nokia and Ericsson’s involvement. The basic design principle for Symbian OS was that of maintaining absolute simplicity, and making conscious and efficient use of the (then) spare resources available on mobile devices. As a result, the ‘OS’ itself did not come with a user interface of any sort. It simply included the (EKA2) nanokernel packaged with a few basic primitives, libraries and device drivers to extend it to the realm of a microkernel.

After an initial reference design, further development of the frontend itself was left to the device manufacturers, leading to the likes of the Nokia Series 60 UI, UIQ etc. Over the course of this decade, mainstream Symbian moved from version 6.0 to the version 9.4 used in Nokia’s last S60 update. Over the course of years, Nokia added features and updates to its S60 UI resulting in various editions and feature packs. The last major update made by Nokia was to add support for high-resolution touch screens resulting in S60 5th Edition. However, sometime in 2008, Symbian went open source and along with the OS, now came packaged the S60 UI, creating what is known as the Symbian Platform. It was also during this time that Nokia started pushing the use of Qt as the framework of choice for Symbian development.

The Symbian platform includes code not just from Nokia, which was the primary contributor to the code base, but also from other companies (Sony Ericsson being one of them) as they decided to withdraw from using and developing Symbian. The platform as such now also includes parts of other releases such as UIQ, MOAP etc. The first product based on Symbian Platform was Symbian^1, which was a mildly reworked S60 5th Edition. Symbian^2 was an insignificant release with only a handful of Japanese vendors releasing handsets based on it. What we see today, Symbian^3, is Nokia’s boldest move forward, bringing significant and much needed updates to the platform. It is also going to be the last major Symbian release for a while, with Symbian^4 having been cancelled and its code base and feature set having been rolled into Symbian^3.

On first look, it may seem like not a lot has changed between Symbian^3 and previous iterations, apart from an improved UI. But Symbian^3 is Nokia’s first OS built from the ground up for the high resolution touch-screen interface paradigm and it is a marked improvement over its rather poorly implemented (and received) S60 5th Edition touch interface. The OS is now finger-friendly and multi-touch capable (except the on-screen keyboard), not requiring a stylus, and makes use of single-tap interaction throughout, thereby eliminating the need to dig through layers of menus. Welcome to the party Nokia, better late than never!

   
(L-R) The slick screensaver that makes use of OLED’s ‘free’ black color, Multitasking in S^3, the Dialer app, a typical S^3 menu

Another significant update to Symbian^3 is the introduction of the GPU accelerated UI. While Symbian has never really been slow to respond to input, this was more a result of the fact that it was almost completely devoid of any animation or effects and as mentioned earlier, Symbian’s inherent thrift when it came to using available resources. Although functional, it looked outright prehistoric compared to most modern mobile operating systems, and having to deal with multiple menu hierarchies to change even fairly obvious settings and options didn’t win it any favors either.

With Symbian^3, Nokia has tried to make a clean transition to the present day and age and for the most part, Symbian^3 and the N8’s BCM2727 media processor is able to pull it off reasonably well. The N8’s response is quick, whether it be navigating the menus or switching between applications. The transitions are smooth with no lag; the phone doesn’t get bogged down even with multiple applications running in the background. It also responds to taps and gestures consistently without needing to double tap or repeat gestures. Overall, using the N8 is a fairly smooth experience with nothing to complain about.

   
Home screens in Symbian^3(first three), S^3 Widget Manager (Right)

Very similar to Android, Symbian^3 now also allows for multiple home screens (three to be exact), with the switching between them facilitated by a simple side-swipe gesture. The current home screen you are on is indicated by one of three dots at the bottom. It is very easy to customize each of the home screens with application shortcuts, notifications, and widgets such as weather, email, social networks, calendar, etc. This is facilitated by a long-press anywhere on the home screen, which initiates the widget manager.

The widgets themselves afford a decent amount of customization. You can also easily switch the widgets online and offline by selecting a single option, unlike the last time I used Symbian where this had to be done on a per application basis. And this logical simplification of actions runs deeper than just the home screen. For example, managing data connections is much simpler on the N8 than it was on the E5. Although it still makes use of “Destinations” to manage your data networks, which isn’t the most straightforward or efficient method to handle data-network related settings, at least all the options are now housed on one page. Symbian^3 also makes some updates to the network stack and it is now 4G ready, should Nokia decide to launch such a device. 

There are some quirks in Symbian^3’s current incarnation. For one, the dialer app does not work in landscape mode. Secondly, there is no QWERTY keyboard in portrait mode. Also, using the keyboard in landscape mode takes up the entire screen. So if you are entering your name in a form on a site, clicking on the text field will open up the keyboard with a white text area up top; you cannot see the site itself. As I quickly learned on the Nokia Ovi Store registration page itself, it becomes very irritating when trying to enter CAPTCHAs. You either have to memorize the entire CAPTCHA, or switch back and forth between the website and landscape keyboard view. And finally, the battery indicator on the N8 is a fair bit off from the actual remaining battery life as reported by the N8 itself!

  
(L-R) S^3 lacks a QWERTY keyboard in portrait mode; battery indicator shows 3/4th of the battery is left, even though it’s not true; the landscape keyboard takes up the whole screen

I’d mentioned earlier that Symbian^3 is going to be Nokia’s last major OS release for a while and this is true. But this does not mean that Nokia plans on pulling on with this release in its current form for another decade. With the closing of Symbian^4 development, what Nokia is actually trying is to do is roll out regular, incremental features and updates to the Symbian^3 code base, instead of branching it off to a new OS release. This is needed for two reasons: to keep Nokia devices such as the N8 competitive, as well as to maintain forward momentum and consumer interest in the Symbian platform. Nokia has promised to make one such significant update to Symbian^3 in early 2011 and some of the updates are much needed.

What’s HAPPening at Nokia…

It’s all about the applications now. Ever since Apple pushed the concept of apps and app development to the mainstream in 2008, companies such as Nokia have been caught off-guard. This is the one area where Nokia still has a lot of work to do. The N8, as with almost all Nokia devices in recent history, has a very inconsistent and frustrating app ecosystem. As with the E5, the Ovi Store app doesn’t even come installed by default on the N8. Instead, clicking on the Ovi Store shortcut in the menu opens up the browser and takes you to a page where you are required to setup an Ovi Store account and download the app. This is ridiculous enough in itself, but to make things worse, I could not get the app store working no matter what I tried on the N8. 

(Left, Center) The Ovi Store was a pain to get up and running on the N8; (Right) when the Ovi Store works 

Each and every time I tried opening the Ovi Store, the browser would be launched and it would open up a blank page with the Ovi Store icon on top. Nothing would happen after this, no matter what I did. Searching on the internet, I found that this was in fact a well-known problem that multiple people were facing with the N8 and apparently had to do with a particular version of the Ovi Store app having problems with Symbian^3 devices. Deleting and trying to re-download the app didn’t help. Finally, the only thing that seemed to work was to log into the Ovi Store via the PC, searching for the Ovi Store app, and sending a download link for it to the phone via text. Really, Nokia?

And it’s not just the Ovi Store app that had issues either. The default email app basically doesn’t work the way it should. Unlike the E5 where there was a definite (if non-obvious) procedure to getting push email working, on the N8 there is no set procedure. Accepting or declining Nokia’s terms and conditions while setting up your email account decides whether or not push notifications are enabled. With push notifications enabled, the N8 refused to sync my Gmail inbox after a couple of hours. Deleting an email from the N8 would have no effect on my Gmail inbox.

Worse yet, the push-email system on the N8 does not let you select the folders you want to sync. Since the N8’s email client didn’t have an “Archive” option, I was forced to mark and move emails to the “All Mails” folder, only to find out that this folder is not available for sync with push notifications turned on. Since this was absolutely essential to the way I used Gmail, I decided to forego push functionality and set up my email accounts again, declining the terms and conditions and with a polling interval of every 10 minutes.

Although you do have control over the folders you want to sync via this method and the N8 does faithfully poll the Gmail servers every 10 mins as configured, no matter what I did, I could not get it to sync my emails properly. To elaborate, if I marked an email as read and deleted it, upon the next sync, it would still show up as unread in my inbox. If I manually “moved it to trash”, after syncing, I would still see it as an unread email in the “All Mails” folder. Again, a quick search on the internet reveals that I’m not alone.

   
(L-R) The inconsistent email app, clunky default browser, browser menu, Opera Mobile 10

The last bit of software that Nokia needs to upgrade, pronto, is the lethargic webkit-based browser on the N8. Hoping that this would have definitely been one of the updates to Symbian^3, I was disappointed to find that apart from tweaking the UI to be touch more friendly, not much has changed with the browser. The GPU-accelerated UI definitely makes things more responsive, and the vibrant 3.5” screen is a marked improvement over the 2.36” in the E5, but the browser itself is very slow and inconsistent in its rendering. It cannot hold a candle next to Mobile Safari, or the Android/WebOS Webkit browsers.

Once again, Opera Mobile 10 mitigates these problems, picks up Nokia’s slack, and makes surfing the web on the N8 a decent experience. But it is an absolute shame that Nokia did not update the browser in this release of Symbian^3. Thankfully however, Nokia has promised to update the browser with the next update, and I sincerely hope they live up to this promise.  

  
(L-R) A very good Nokia Swype app; the photo browser app makes good use of the GPU; the excellent Ovi Maps

Other apps worked as they should, including the excellent Ovi Maps app. The N8 uses its integrated GPS, A-GPS and WiFi-positioning for navigation duties and also sports a compass. You can have a look at a more detailed discussion of Ovi Maps in my E5 review here. I did however notice with the N8 that it took an awful long time to get hold of a cold GPS signal, and Nokia made a questionable decision of not including maps on the N8 out of the box.

One feature that I found very interesting was the “Turning Control” that could be used to silence a call or snooze an alarm, simply by flipping the N8 over on its front. The N8 is now my official snooze tool! The music player uses a Cover Flow-esq design that works very well with the GPU driving the fluid animation. And although I couldn’t test the video calling function out-of-the-box (and with Skype not having implemented Video Chat capability on the Symbian platform), I did manage to make a few test calls with Fring and it seems to work just fine (although a friend of mine did say that she couldn’t see my video on her iPod Touch 2G).

 
(L-R): Video call on Fring; Skype on S^3; some of the interesting Nokia Beta apps

Also, I encourage you to look up Nokia’s beta apps portal, as there seem to be some really interesting albeit experimental apps in there. I found an excellent Swype keyboard implementation, a cool photo browser that makes very good use of the GPU, and the very interesting “Nokia Bots” applications in there, amongst others.

Down to the numbers

Nokia has packed the N8 to the gills with features and this trend continues on with the connectivity. The N8 boasts support for 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0 (both powered by a TI WL1271A chip), and yes, the N8 is a quad-band GSM and penta-band 3G/3.5G phone. What this means is that you will have complete voice and 3G/3.5Gdata coverage practically anywhere in the world. Looks like Brian has had his prayers answered! And if set so, the N8 can automatically switch between GSM and UMTS bands, depending on availability.

But in spite of packing in so much hardware, the Nokia N8 put out some decent battery life numbers. And this is a bit surprising considering the fact that the N8 comes packed with the same 1200mAh BL-4D battery as the decidedly lower end E5!

*Just like with the E5, the N8’s default browser would stop loading the AT test suite pages (only over WiFi) after a couple of iterations without closing the browser and manually restarting the test.

Although I couldn’t test it specifically, the GSM-only talk time battery life of the N8 seemed a decent bit more than the 3G battery life, as I was able to get away with moderate non-3G voice and data usage for about 2.5 days without having to recharge.

Now down to the performance numbers. As mentioned earlier, the N8 unfortunately has the same browser as the E5 and as such, shows similarly poor performance. 

Update: As pointed out in the comments by astute observers, the version of Opera 10 tested from the Ovi Store is incorrectly labeled 10.1 when it is in fact 10.0. We've installed and tested Opera 10.1 on the N8 and updated the graphs below to reflect the correct results for both 10.0 and 10.1. Browsermark shows an improvement of nearly 94%, and SunSpider has gone up almost 9x, which is a nice improvement to say the least. 

As Brian pointed out in his GLBenchmark article, we’ve included some numbers for the N8. GLBenchmark does not yet officially support Symbian^3, and the version I ran on the N8 was for S60 5th Edition. Although I didn’t have any issues running other S50 5th edition apps, the Egypt test in the GLBenchmark suite refused to run on the N8. It would show the loading screen for some time and then exit to the home screen. I have included numbers for the PRO test below.

As you can see, while no SGX 540, the BCM2727 in the N8 is almost on par with the Adreno 205 and SGX 535 GPU’s, though the test runs at 640x360 on the N8 compared to 800x480 on most other devices we have numbers for. 

Conclusion

Now is not a good time to be Nokia. Once the king of the (smartphone) hill with an overwhelming majority of the smartphone market share, the lack of evolving to changing consumer demands in a fast enough manner has seen its smartphone share plummet. With Apple and Google thoroughly beating Nokia in its traditionally weak markets (North America for example), and taking the fight to its traditional strongholds (Europe and Asia), they don’t seem to be showing any signs of slowing things down. In fact, it almost seems too little too late for Nokia with the N8 and Symbian^3. Had the N8 launched at the end of 2009 or the beginning of 2010, before the explosion of Android slate devices and the iPhone 4, the N8 would have clearly been the best smartphone with little competition.

But it’s not all so gloomy. Nokia still commands massive brand recall in a lot of major markets. And the N8-00 is a solid smartphone; hands-down the best mainstream phone Nokia has put forth to date (again, ignoring the outlier than N900 is). In fact, Nokia sells the N8-00 as a ‘mobile computer’ and while I’ve always thought of this as being a marketing gimmick for their Nseries devices, I am fairly convinced that the N8 actually befits this tag. With most definitely the best camera ever seen on a mobile phone, the N8 is a worthy replacement to basic point snf shoots. With excellent media handling capabilities, HDMI out and the very useful USB-To-Go capability, the N8 actually fulfills basic HTPC duties with no fuss. And Ovi Maps, a definitely capable replacement for dedicated navigation devices. As is clear from this review, Nokia has made sure to implement whatever features it has included in the N8, with great attention to detail. And thankfully this time, this attention to detail has also mostly translated to the software side of things…traditionally Nokia’s weakness.

Symbian^3 is a definite and marked improvement over the previous Series 60 5th Edition without any doubt. With Symbian^3, Nokia has finally entered the modern smartphone market and it makes a strong showing here. There still are issues that Nokia needs to fix ASAP—the browser, mail application and Ovi Store being the major ones. If Nokia executes on the continuous and ongoing incremental updates to the Symbian^3 platform that it has committed to, in a timely manner, we may finally have a Nokia device that we can recommend without any obvious compromises or flaws. And with one such update promised for the N8 sometime in Q1 2011, it may be the device to recommend, after the update.

As an interesting side note, the Nokia C7 is a cheaper alternative to the N8. If the top-notch camera in the N8 doesn’t pique your interest and you’re willing to forego half the storage (now 8GB), you will get everything else the N8 has to offer, potentially better battery life, plus NFC-support, for a decent amount less than the N8.