Nokia N8 official! Price, specs and pics!

Videos Nokia N8 from Youtube


GLOBAL- The Nokia N8 today officially emerges into the daylight, stepping out of the shadows equipped with a host of smartphone talents.
The first device to be powered by the brand new Symbian 3 platform. The Nokia N8 will launch with a new breed of camera that promises to capture photos and video to rival dedicated point and shoot cameras. Read on to explore Nokia N8's full list of talents.

The biggest feature on the Nokia N8 is its 12-megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics and Xenon flash. It features a substantially larger sensor than any ever used in any other Nokia device - even bigger than many found in dedicated cameras.

Recently, we caught up with Nokia's resident camera guru, Damian Dinning, to get the full lowdown on what went into fine-tuning the N8's camera and video capture skills - you'll be able to read the full fact-packed story right here on Conversations this week, so stay tuned.

The Nokia N8 also doubles as a portable entertainment centre. Watch HD quality video with Dolby Digital Plus surround sound and hook into a dedicated Web TV application for access to news and entertainment on the move.

It's not just its 12-megapixel camera and HD video skills with HDMI support that set the Nokia apart from the crowd. Packing more memory than most, the Nokia N8 has 16GB of built-in storage and is expandable up to 48GB with a micro SD card.

Joining the social messaging fold with the likes of the latest Eseries and Cseries devices, the N8 enters the fray with live Twitter and Facebook updates direct to your homescreen. Comment, read and send messages, update your status and share your location and photos with one touch.

Embracing location based services, the N8 is location-savvy and comes with free global Ovi Maps walk and drive navigation with support in more than 70 countries worldwide.

Powering the Nokia N8 is the all-new Symbian 3 platform. This latest incarnation introduces major new advances including multi-touch and support for gestures such as pinch-to-zoom. Onboard there's also three customisable homescreens that can be loaded with applications and widgets and flicked through by a swish of the finger. There's also improved 2D and 3D graphics for a faster and more responsive UI, greater memory management and a visual task manager.

Of course, the Nokia N8 comes with access to the full range of Ovi services and it's Nokia's first smartphone to be integrated with Qt. Got and idea for an app? Qt is a software development environment that makes it a cinch to build apps and deploy across the Symbian and other software platforms.

Not to be outdone by its innards the Nokia N8 is carved from a single piece of anodised aluminium and looks glorious decked in one of five eye-catching colours (we'll shortly be bringing you entire article dedicated to the colours). It will cost €370 (before the usual local taxes and subsidies) when it starts shipping in the third quarter of 2010.

Over the coming week we'll bring you heaps more insight and info surrounding the new Nokia N8, including designer interviews, exclusive videos, and much more. Stay tuned for all unmissable coverage throughout the week. In the meantime, share your instamt reactions and let us know what you want to know about the Nokia N8 by joining the conversation below.




By Rhiain, http://conversations.nokia.com

Nokia's Smartphone Reinvention Begins With N8 Phone

Video Nokia N8 from Youtube


Nokia today unveiled the N8, the first handset from the Finnish company to use both the Symbian 3 operating system and the Qt cross-platform application framework. Although the physical hardware of the N8 is attractive, the Symbian 3 software is more important to Nokia's future. The company's falling status as a market leader is largely due to its reliance on an old interface not fully optimized for touch, so Symbian 3 represents Nokia's best chance to prove that it can still reign atop the smartphone world.


The N8 toucscreen supports multitouch navigation and gestures, the ability to run multiple programs simultaneously and social network status updates directly from the home screen.With a 12 megapixel camera and Carl Zeiss optics, consumers can use the N8 to create and edit HD-quality video recordings, which can be shared or viewed on a television by connecting the N8 with a cable. Nokia plans to launch the N8 in the third quarter for 370 euros ($492) in select markets.

The N8 marks Nokia's largest undertaking to recapture lost smartphones market share - which has dropped to 39 percent from over 50 percent just two years ago. Some of that loss has come at the hands of newer mobile operating systems, such as those from Apple (a aapl) and Google. As competitors created new platforms and user interfaces, Nokia relied heavily on its aging Symbian S60 system.
The lone smartphone exception is Nokia's N900, which runs on the Maemo platform - a derivative of Linux.

While the hardware looks stellar on paper - the first images captured with the N8' s camera rival those of a high-quality dedicated digital camera, for example - Nokia is pinning its hope on the software that will power the N8 as well as future Nokia phones.

Using the new Symbian 3 platform, Nokia hopes to reverse its market share losses and prove to consumers that it can still reign atop the smartphone world. And by leveraging the Pt evironment that it owns, Nokia is also attempting to woo developers to write software for new Symbian 3 devices.



By Kevin C. Tofel, http://gigaom.com