Fortunately, the handset managed to deliver on that one too, achieving some excellent scores in our traditional test. Nokia N8's multimedia prowess wouldn't be complete without high quality audio output. In this case you can control it through the music player widget on the homescreen, which also indicates the currently running track. Quite naturally, the player can also be minimized to play in background. With the huge number of supported formats, available equalizer presets and effects the picture is complete.
The music player got a visual upgrade too There’s automatic sorting by artist, album, genre and the option to create custom playlists straight from the phone. With Symbian^3 however Nokia introduces a new Cover Flow-like interface, which adds the much needed eye-candy. Symbian never had trouble with the music player functionality but its looks were not quite impressive. You need to wait for a second or two every time you start zooming in on a photo. Overall, picture browsing is relatively fast even with 12 MP pics, but zooming is somewhat slow. The final features of the image gallery include the image tagging system for easier image sorting, the slide show and the albums system (again helping you sort your image database). At least that’s how it works on non-touch Symbian smartphones. We guess that can easily by installing the necessary uploading profiles for the services you’re interested in.
Unfortunately sharing is only available through MMS, email or Bluetooth with no image sharing service integration. Selection of multiple photos for deleting or sharing is available straight from the gallery.
In addition to the familiar pinch gesture you can also zoom in by double taping, the volume rocker or even the on-screen slider. On the positive side opting between portrait and landscape mode is automatic, thanks to the built-in accelerometer. Sure, sweep gestures have been available for a while now and you are also getting pinch-zooming now with the N8 so it’s not all bad but some eye-candy would have been more than welcome.Īlso we miss kinetic scrolling and panning, which will cost the N8 a few more points.
The Nokia N8 comes with virtually the same image browsing software as its predecessors and honestly, it only qualifies as passable by modern standards. Symbian^3 might have improved a lot of things about the UI but the gallery has not been on the upgrade list. When we plugged the other end of the USB cable in a Nokia E71 though, its memory card immediately popped up in the N8 file manager.
We tested an Android handset, an iPhone and even a Bada device and they all started charging but wouldn’t connect in mass storage mode. The N8 successfully handled all the USB flash drives we threw at it but for one, while the handsets that weren’t created by Nokia generally refused to share their memory with the N8. With the Nokia N8 and its USB on-the-go support you can also use the file manger to access USB flash drives and even other phones connected over the supplied cable.
All you need to remember is a part of the desired name and where it was located (phone memory or memory card), the Nokia N8 will find it in no time. You can also search for a specific file or directory. You can also password-protect your memory card if you see fit. The File manager on board the N8 is a solid app that can basically do anything you can think of with your files - moving, copying renaming, sorting or sending - you name it. Unlike some competing platforms Symbian handsets have always enjoyed a proper file manager.