Nokia has officially announced its new N8 smartphone, with the handset packing in a top of the line feature set.
The camera is a whopping 12 megapixel camera affair, with Carl Zeiss optics and a Xenon flash, while the screen is served up in the shape of a 3.5-inch capacitive touchscreen.
There’s also a HDMI output onboard for hooking up your tele, plus 16GB of internal storage backed by a microSD expansion slot (we like them).
Wrapping up the feature set is HD video recording, access to Ovi Store apps, free Ovi Maps walk and drive navigation, with the handset purring along on Nokia’s shiny new Symbian^3 operating system.
The multiple-page homescreen can be loaded with apps and widgets, and there’s multitasking and support for multitouch gestures to keep you whizzing around the features.
Five shades of Nokianess
It’s set to ship in five colours, with availability in “select markets” coming up in Q3. The subsidy-free price has been set at £320/€370 ($494) but no doubt they’ll be plentiful network freebie deals on offer.
Tough battle ahead
Nokia’s new handset will be entering a very crowded marketplace and we’re finding it hard to get too stoked considering the big, beautiful and bountiful Android handsets charging over the hillside this summer.
The early hands on reviews haven’t been too positive either, with one Russian site dismissing the new OS as nothing more than a cosmetic makeover of the decidely iffy Symbian^1 system, but we’ll wait until we get our hands on one before making up our minds.
But 12MP and Carl Zeiss lens? Very nice. Very nice indeed.
Promo videos ahoy!
Tech specs:
* System: WCDMA 850/900/1700/1900/2100 and GSM/EDGE 850/900/1800/1900
* OS: Symbian^3
* Form Factor: Touch screen monoblock
* Dimensions: 113.5 x 59.12 x 12.9 mm (L x W x H)
* Weight: 135g
* Display: 3.5 inch widescreen (640 x 360 pixels) capacitive touch
* Battery: 1200mAh BL-4D
* Media Storage/Memory: 16GB mass memory + micro SD card slot, 135MB internal memory, support up to 32GB memory cards. RAM256 ROM512
* Video Playback: Video recording, Performance: encoding 25fps, decoding 30fps, File Formats: H.264, MPEG-4, VC-1, H.263, Real Video 10, ON2 VP6, Flash video
* Music Playback: FM radio, FM transmitter, MP3 player, Supported codecs: MP3,AAC,eAAC, eAAC+,WMA,AMR-WB, DRM support, DRM: OMA DRM 2.0
* Main Camera:
o Lens: Carl Zeiss optics
o Image capture: 12 megapixels
o Video capture: HD 720p
o Aperture: F2.8
o Focal length: 5.4
o Flash: Xenon flash
* Connectivity:
* HDMI adapter CA-157
* WLAN IEEE802.11 b/g/n
* BT2.1 with support for stereo headsets
* Positioning with GPS, A-GPS, WLAN and Cell-ID
* Micro-USB 2.0 high speed for file transfers and charging
* USB On-the-Go
* Nokia AV connector 3.5 mm for audio input/output and TV out
Here’s the full press release from Nokia.
Nokia N8. Connect. Create. Entertain.
April 27, 2010
Espoo, Finland – The Nokia N8, Nokia’s latest smartphone, intuitively connects to the people, places and services that matter most. With the Nokia N8, people can create compelling content, connect to their favorite social networks and enjoy on-demand Web TV programs and Ovi Store apps. Available in select markets during the third quarter of 2010, the estimated retail price of the Nokia N8 is EUR 370, before applicable taxes or subsidies.The Nokia N8 introduces a 12 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, Xenon flash and a large sensor that rivals those found in compact digital cameras. Additionally, the Nokia N8 offers the ability to make HD-quality videos and edit them with an intuitive built-in editing suite. Doubling as a portable entertainment center, people can enjoy HD-quality video with Dolby Digital Plus surround sound by plugging into their home theatre system. The Nokia N8 enables access to Web TV services that deliver programs, news and entertainment from channels like CNN, E! Entertainment, Paramount and National Geographic. Additional local Web TV content is also available from the Ovi Store.
Social networking is second nature to the Nokia N8. People can update their status, share location and photos, and view live feeds from Facebook and Twitter in a single app directly on the home screen. Calendar events from social networks can also be transferred to the device calendar.
The Nokia N8 comes with free global Ovi Maps walk and drive navigation, guiding people to places and points of interest in more than 70 countries worldwide.
Symbian^3 in action
Powering the Nokia N8 is Symbian ^3, the latest edition of the world’s most used smartphone software, which introduces several major advances, including support for gestures such as multi touch, flick scrolling and pinch-zoom. The Nokia N8 also offers multiple, personalizable homescreens which can be loaded with apps and widgets. The new 2D and 3D graphics architecture in the platform takes full advantage of the Nokia N8’s hardware acceleration to deliver a faster and more responsive user interface. Symbian^3 also raises the bar in performance by delivering greater memory management allowing more applications to run in parallel for a faster multi-tasking experience.Getting Qt for Developers
The Nokia N8 is Nokia’s first device to be integrated with Qt, a software development environment that simplifies the development and makes it possible to build applications once and deploy across Symbian and other software platforms. Nokia has also made the powerful and simple to use Nokia Qt SDK available, in its initial beta, to enable developers to start realizing the potential of Qt.
