Nokia N8 review

I so badly wanted to like this phone. In my world, Nokia just hasn’t cracked it since the E71. That phone rocked my world. Nothing has since, and it seems that until Symbian has been rudely shoved aside, this situation will remain.

Here’s a quick hit summary of the Nokia N8, with my fairly simple recommendation. Although the price is good, there are no BUY signs.

POSITIVES:

* Screen quality and resolution is beautiful.

* Touch mechanic has been vastly improved.

* Don’t have to remove battery to change SIM.

* HDMI out rocks the house (although I never have had the inclination to plug my phone in to watch HD content on the LCD screen!).

* Now has Foursquare.

* Comes with six months free music.

NEGATIVES:

* Battery life is pathetic, in one case it ran out overnight. This probably has something to do with the widgets that run in the background, but I shouldn’t have to fiddle to get a day’s battery life out of my phone. Even with everything switched off — getting 12 hours was a good day.

* Software is really buggy, multiple crashes from multiple places.

* Symbian just isn’t designed for touch, so I found myself needing to push extra buttons and go through extra steps to complete menial tasks. Just getting the on screen keyboard to come up is a step I don’t want. Managing email in the gMail app is now a pain in the ass, and the web version doesn’t have the touch interface that iPhone and Android has.

* Another example of the UI / UX issues. Making a phone call: push phone button, push address book, find the number, then rechoose the “make a call button”, then confirm the call. Sigh.

* No threaded view that I could find for the native mail app.

* Software is oh, so, slow.

* The native Facebook Widget, meant to display updates to the home screen (and most likely vampiring my battery life) says everything happened 3 hours ago.

And that’s really the clincher. Everything happened three hours ago. Nokia has been behind the clock for a while, even though their hardware choice is usually pretty spiffy. Let’s hope the new CEO shakes things up. They have two billion customers. For now …