The Nokia N8 Part 1

I will be giving my experiences using the Nokia N8 over the next few days.

Appearance

I can’t help feeling the phone looks like an electric razor. I find the phone a bit slippery so some people might prefer using a silicone cover. The camera is mounted in in an odd looking buldge together with a xenon flash, an LED light and the mono speaker.

N8 camera seen from the side

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N8 from the side

The shell is mostly metal except for the top and bottom which are plastic. The antenna is in the top part.

USB On-The-Go

I tested the following devices:

Device	Result
Memory stick	Works
Sanyo Xacti camera	Works in “screen capture” mode
Memory card reader	Does not work
USB powered hard disk	Does not work. Even when formatted as FAT32
iPod classic 160GB	Does not work
USB Hub	Does not work
Samsung Galaxy S	Mass memory mode
Mouse	Works. You even get a mouse cursor on the screen!
Keyboard	Works.

USB mouse attached to N8. Notice the mouse cursor

It’s a pity hard disks aren’t supported. An additional issue here is that NTFS is probably also not supported. I even tried connecting one specific hard disk to a 5V power supply but no luck.

Camera

Video camera

You can now HDMI at 1280X720. It will however eat through about 12Mbits per second. Use this with the HDMI out feature and you can watch your videos on your Hi Def TV. The quality is very good. You can zoom while capturing although zooming is a bit jerky. The zoomed image is not as blocky as you would expect from a digital zoom since the entire 12M pixel sensor is used to capture the image.

Stills camera

The 12M pixel photos look stunning and with such a high resolution who needs an optical zoom? Here is a shot I took of my son diving into the pool. I would have expected a lens cover though.

Xenon flash

To give you an idea what the fuss is about consider the following two pics:

Nokia N900: Spinning fan, flash fired

Nokia N8: Spinning fan, with flash

No I didn’t cheat. In the N8 picture the fan was really spinning.

E-mail

I use GMail and I struggled to get things going the way I want them. The secret is this: When you get to the “Terms of Service” screen during the mailbox setup, you should select “Decline”. This bypasses Ovi Mail and your e-mail is downloaded directly to your phone. You are limited to a maximum of 250 messages per folder which I find rather limiting. The e-mail app now also supports HTML formatted e-mail.

Remote drives

This is actually a WebDAV client. I set it up to access my MobileMe iDisk. To set it up set address to https://idisk.me.com/username/ and enter your MobileMe username and password.

Part 2

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