Nokia N8 Hands-On Preview

A brief hands-on with an N8 prototype.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Nokia N8
• Symbian ^3

[MrRichy96]

why would you buy a lame ass nokia phone when you can have an iPhone 4 ?!?

[otso56]

@cjn52 Also, while I hate to play this argument cos stuff should work out of the box, if the out of the box browser would seriously fail to work, you can always get Opera Mini and be done with most of the problems.

A preview that was written few days back (dunno what firmware were they running though) said that they first installed Opera Mini, but ended up not even launching it when they found the default browser great.

[otso56]

@cjn52 ANd then just generally speaking you can't really compare released product and a prototype just like this. In all of the older videos the performance is quite slow no matter what you do. I used one a week ago and it was like night and day difference. You can see it has gotten alot better in some of the newer videos too when theres a slightly fresher firmware.

[otso56]

@cjn52 It's an early firmware prototype, they are remaking the browser with Qt, although it won't make it to the finished version, the pinch to zoom fails to work cos he isnt holding the phone (something to do with grounding), and most of the other problems fade when the page is fully loaded.

Sure, I see problems, but nothing that can't be fixed in several months (that will be between this firmware and retail firmware) of software tweaking and the new browser on it's way.

[maria82792]

i HAVE to get this phone! how did you get one? :D

[cjn52]

@otso56: Did you not notice the horrendous browser performance? Play with a Samsung Galaxy, or any number of competitor's devices...it's night & day. If this is all Nokia can do..they need to get out of the smartphone market and be a producer of plain feature phones-their strong point anyway

[zoidbetag]

It's a prototype. Meaning that it is not finnished (both in software and in hardware).

[otso56]

@cjn52 I see very little to nothing wrong with this, I think it's looking absolutely fantastic considering it's still a prototype too.

[cjn52]

This looks like another half baked Nokia product....so similar to the N97 in appearance...if not for the camera it's all bad

[andref1989]

The issue with Multi-touch is two-fold.

If the handset isn't being held, the multiple touch events are not detected, seems to be a problem with the device grounding. IIRC the Evo4G had a similar problem. The second issue appears to be that zooming is messed up when the page isn't finished loading and when flash objects are present. Can't zoom or pan if you're touching a flash object.