In spite of sporting a whole host of features and one of the best cameras to have ever graced a phone, Nokia’s latest is perhaps more evolutionary than revolutionary.
If nothing else, the Nokia N8 definitely beats a few records for being the most anticipated phone of the year … for nearly an entire year! We’ve been hearing about it, seeing it and even experiencing it in bits and pieces since February but actually only got our hands on it a few weeks ago before its official launch. You can wade through a detailed spec by spec review on technoholik.com but this piece is about the larger questions.
Can the N8, running the new Symbian 3 operating system, bring Nokia back into the smartphone game and help it catch up with Apple and Android? Is it even good enough to keep up with the rapidly improving Windows Phone and Blackberry platforms?
The answer to the first question would have been an emphatic yes if this sleek touchscreen phone had been on the shelves two years ago. It would have been a definite “yes” to the second question if the launch date was one year ago. But for a phone launching in October 2010, the only answer we can come up with is an “unlikely”. Make no mistake, we think the hardware is outstanding. It’s definitely the best “feature phone” out there by a mile.
The 12 Megapixel camera with LED assisted autofocus and Xenon flash is probably the best in the world largely because of its enlarged sensor. Its glorious AMOLED screen may not have the highest resolution out there, but with toughened “Gorilla Glass” is practically invincible and yet very responsive to touch.
You can plug a pen drive or another phone into it via USB to browse and copy files, hook it up with a high def TV using an HDMI cable to view your phone’s screen output (including videos), copy music from your Windows 7 PC without any extra software and do tons of other cool stuff that say an iPhone user could never dream of. All these however are, at the end of the day, nice features. And features no longer maketh the smartphone.
What really has us hooked to Apple’s iOS and increasingly Android are apps, maps and the cloud. Nokia’s Ovi Store service continues to be spotty and while the number of apps is indeed increasing by the day, they’re just not enticing enough. The least Nokia can do is embed the Ovi Store app into the phone instead of making users go through an installation process.
Ovi Maps is still not a patch on Google Maps especially since it isn’t multi-touch enabled which means pinching to zoom in and out of a map area won’t work. As for the cloud, its nearly impossible to compete with Google and Android unless you’ve got equivalent web-services (email, calendar, contacts etc) that are best in class.
As far as corporate mail goes, forget the berry! Even Android’s MS Exchange mail app is miles ahead of Nokia’s buggy Mail4Exchange program.
But the Espoo, Finland based giant still has some potential aces up its sleeve, especially in emerging markets. It’s free unlimited downloads service called “Comes with Music” is a welcome alternative in a country where piracy is rampant largely because legal options are unavailable or unaffordable. If Nokia can pull off something similar for movies and TV, with the advent of 3G it could have a big winner on its hands.
However, the critical battle now is for the hearts and minds of developers who will need to build apps for the Symbian platform as well as the upcoming Meego operating system in collaboration with Intel. With the world’s largest installed base of handsets, Nokia has the potential to garner many first time smartphone users who are familiar with Symbian and might be a tad intimidated by other platforms. For any of them, the Rs 26,000 N8 would open up a new world. For anyone already using an iPhone or Android handset though, there’s still no compelling reason to switch.