Nokia N8: India Preview

Earlier this month our colleagues at PC World U.S. managed to try out the Nokia N8. Today was our chance to the same at the Nokia Research Centre in Bangalore.

Design-wise, Nokia haven't taken too many risks and although the N8 won't win many beauty contests, its a good looking phone nonetheless. We saw two color versions of the phone- light green and black and both of them looked smart. The build quality was excellent owing to aluminium bodies but that also made the phones slightly heavy.

With the N8, Nokia has introduced a couple of new features including out of the box XviD/DivX support, an AMOLED scratch resistant capacitive touchscreen and a 12MP camera with a Xenon flash. The N8 supports USB On the Go specification which allows it to power and read off other low-powered flash USB devices such as pen-drives. The Nokia officials claimed that the N8 could also power mice and gaming controllers but that's something we'll have to wait and see in our comprehensive review. The N8 also comes with a HDMI port that will let you directly play HD content off the phone itself on your television.

The N8's 12MP camera is impressive and quite fast thanks to a manual shutter. It has auto-focus but no touch focus like the one seen on the Samsung Galaxy S and other phones. The camera can shoot 720p videos and comes with an onboard image and video editor.

The N8 runs Symbian^3 and overall, we didn't see that many great differences over the S60 UI. There are a couple of changes including the fact that now every action requires a single touch as opposed to the double touch we were used to in phones like the 5800 XpressMusic and the N97 mini. The N8 also had three homescreens each of which could be customized with shortcuts and widgets. The look and feel of the UI and subsequent menus inside wasn't all that different from the previous UI.

The Nokia officials wouldn't speculate on an exact launch date and Indian price. However, we were told that the device would be launched sometime this month and would probably cost somewhere around the Rs, 25,000 mark.

Watch this space for updates.