N8

I’ve had the nokia N8 for a few weeks now and since I like it, I thought I’d do a little review.

Does it have rough edges? Sadly, yes there are some. But no major show stoppers. It’s stable. The camera is awesome. The video playback is great. You can play most movies without re-encoding them. I managed to not run out of battery during a trans atlantic flight, watching movies non stop, and the oled screen is fantastic.

I’m particularly happy with how maps is improving with each version.

It went from something that barely worked a few years ago to being arguably one of the best mobile maps experiences around. It’s certainly very competitive when it comes to map quality, navigation, and offline usage.Disclaimer, I work on the backend services for this application :-).

I’ve used two ovi store applications to write this post. One is called swype and it replaces the touchscreen keyboard with a version that allows you to ‘draw’ across the keyboard and it figures out the words with great accuracy and speed.

The other is the official wordpress client, which I’m trying for the first time, and of course that’s the real reason for writing all this :-).

So far so good. I managed to write a good chunk of text with swype and the wordpress app seems to do everything I need it to do.

All together this is a pretty good phone and it is getting even better with upcoming software releases. I think the recent focus of nokia on software quality and end user experience is starting to pay off. It’s not without flaws of course and it’s definitely to early to call the battle with our competitors over but it is progress and I think we’re getting there.

A final note here. I work for Nokia and am of course slightly biased. That being said, I rarely review stuff we produce and as a rule only when I really like it, without reservations. I loved the n900, which I reviewed a few months ago, but I’ve had several nokia phones that I chose not to review as well for this reason.