Nokia and Symbian appear to have finally come up with a respectable response to smartphone competition from Apple and Android in the shape of the N8, announced on Tuesday.
The handset is the first to adopt Symbian’s latest ^3 operating system and will be available in the third quarter in “select markets”.
As Lee Williams, executive director of the Symbian foundation, told us recently, ^3 represents the Nokia-favoured OS catching up with the Android and iPhone competition with multi-touch, multi-tasking, Flash-compatibility, widgets, social address books and a more sophisticated look to the interface.
The N8 also has some impressive hardware features, notably in imaging – there is a 12 megapixel camera with 28mm wide-angle optics from Carl Zeiss, Xenon flash and face-detection software. The handset is capable of HD video, it has editing features and an HDMI out for playing on an HDTV.
The video capabilities are similar to the HTC Evo, a 4G Android phone unveiled by Sprint at CTIA in March.
The N8 also has an attractive music player with coverflow features and was demonstrated with a number of games, although its 680Mhz processor lacks the horsepower of 1Ghz ones now becoming the norm for high-end smartphones.
Other features include a 3.5-inch OLED touchscreen, 16Gb of internal memory and Wi-Fi 802.11n.
Nokia is pricing the phone at E370, suggesting many operators will offer it for free with a two-year contract.
Features such as 4G, Wi-Fi hotspot capability, 1GHz processing and larger screens are becoming available on a select few high-end smartphones. The N8 lacks these, but it is priced appropriately and its imaging capabilities are a match for any smartphone.
