Category: Reviews

So the much awaited N8 has finally arrived, and has had its time to dig its niche out in the market. For the Nokia fanatics, this was time for preorder and booking hushups and unboxing bliss. To the reviewers, it was their turn to dig their fingernails deep into the beast and find out what really lies beneath that shiny armour. And to the ever-present gawker-geek community, who’s shallow pockets allow them little more than to watch the commotion, read every reviews and user-reviews and find out what the deal actually is.

I was watching closely as the reviews, shootouts and comparisons rolled out. I could already predict that N8 is going to get quite some sticks about it’s comparitively low specs (on sheets, that is), and the “uninspiring” Symbian interface; but saw little reason why anyone would want to complain about the N8’s camera. But alas, what I saw caught me totally off guard. Ninety percent of the reviewers chose to mercilessly slap muck on N8’s face. I even found N8 v/s iPhone 4 shootouts, “proving” the latter was actually better than the 12MP hype.

I haven’t even seen an N8, an iPhone or any Android device, so I can’t authoritively disprove these comments, but I think this is a bit of an overreaction – it’s as if the reviewers already knew what they were going to say even before they actually saw their devices. None of the reviewers seemed to give the N8 it’s fair chance; with the exception of GSMArena – this was the only truthful and scientific review of the N8 that I could find.

Talking about the interface, I guess we have a point there – Symbian is still quite some distance behind the streamlined interfaces the competitors offer. We can only hope that Nokia will hone the UI in the Symbian^4 and MeeGo platforms to match the competition. However, there is one distinct point to be noted here – Symbian is a geek’s OS – ask any technologically-inclined person that has been using a Symbian device for a while now – the odds are that he’ll be in love with his device. There are enough stuff in Symbian to tinker around with – which is not exactly the case with, say, iPhone – “easy” also means “less interesting”, atleast to the geek.

Also – this is a personal opinion, so feel free to counter me in the comments section if you feel so – many features that Symbian lack are things that users can live without – like multiple, scrollable homescreens, and custom widgets, for instance. But there are things that Symbian have that many of the competitors doesn’t – like a proper system-wide file manager for instance. Or even, bluetooth file transfer, or copy-paste functionality. These are things that are less talked about, but I guess these are more indispensible from the user’s perspective than the flashy gimmicks.

About the specs too, we have to admit that 680MHz CPU and 256 MB of RAM are a bit too low by today’s standards. Only the hardware 3D accelerator can claim to be a point worth bragging. However, there is one important factor that we should consider – like the developers always claim, Symbian is the most resource-effiecient mobile OS on the planet – so with those low-grade innards, Symbian should probably deliver comparable performance. Also, no other platform allows such seamless multitasking as Symbian does – typically, mobile Oses save the state of the app on the local memory when the user minimizes the app, and load it back when he switches back to it again, rather than keep then running in the background, like Symbian does.
However, this slightly overly resource -conscious nature of Symbian has been notorious to give the developers a very hard time – but that is not the part the story that concerns the end user.

About the camera, let’s face it, the N8 has been facing quite a little unfair blame in this department – with a 12MP sensor and sensor area never before seen on a cameraphone, N8 was theoritically supposed to be the best cameraphone of its time – is that really the case? No says most critics, and to be honest, I believe that they are lying.
I’ve seen, for instance, an iPhone v/s N8 shootout, where the iPhone snaps actually looked better. But to understand why, you will need to take a closer look. Firstly, iPhone boosts the colours to give a more vivid outcome that looks pleasing to the eye, while N8 leaves the image largely untouched, giving a realistic and professional photograph. Secondly, the angles from which the pictures were taken looked deliberately different – the differences where tiny yet clever, so that the ambient light, background colour and other factors worked just fine for the iPhone, while N8 what positioned like the ambient light would wash out the picture, or one object would intrude in the scene and interfere with the focus.

On the other hand, I saw another shootout – this was a blind test – GSMArena hosted 3 sets of photos of many scenes – indoor, outdoor, synthetic test images etc. One was shot on a Samsung Pixon12, another on an N8, and the third, with a dedicated 12MP Sony digicam. The pictures were numbered A, B and C (without telling what phone took which photo) and users were asked to vote which snap, of each set was the best. And the results came, everybody, including me and even the website owners, were left aghast – the N8 actually beat even the standalone camera on a 5-to-1 margin! (I would have loved to post a link here, but unfortunately, they have since deleted the page)

To wind up, this is not a healthy trend, if reviewers turn brand-conscious — we’ve seen that among movie and music critics already, but technology is one field we can’t afford such affinities anyway. Reviewers should acclaim the products for what they are worth and bash them for what they are not – they should not overstate a feature, or blame something just on premonitions. Brand consicousness, premonitions about many things, a fondness to a specific feature with less care about others – these are all luxuries exclusive to the end users, not reviewers.