Nokia N8 12MP camera phone officially launched

Nokia has finally accepted and acknowledged the existence of its next generation Symbian smartphone - the N8. The phone has had its specifications leaked just a day ago and it seems, Nokia has had enough. The company has announced the phone officially. The N8 has been in the news lately and it was just yesterday that the first reviews of the handset surfaced. Just a few hours later, a document detailing the phones spec sheet was revealed.

Now that the phone has been made official, let's see what it has in store for you the potential buyer. The N8 happens to be Nokia's first 12 megapixel camera phone - complete with Carl Zeiss optics, Xenon flash and a large sensor that, according to Nokia, rivals those found in compact digital cameras. The N8 is also the first Nokia device to support HD Video recording. The N8 also features a built-in video editing suite - the effectiveness of which we're unsure of. The phone supports Dolby Digital Plus surround sound and users can connect it to their home theatre system. Contrary to the expectation that it would come with 64GB of internal memory, it will ship with "just" 16GB of in-built storage space. With MicroSD slots, the memory is expandable up to 48GB.

Unlike the last Symbian based flagship, the N97, the N8 runs the latest version of the Symbian OS - Symbian ^3. While they share quite a few visual cues, S60 Version5 and Symbian^3 are two different operating systems. Symbian^3 supports multitouch (although as of now we're unsure if it has been used effectively on the N8), flick scrolling and pinch-zoom. The Nokia N8 also offers multiple, personalizable homescreens which can be loaded with apps and widgets. The new 2D and 3D graphics architecture in the platform takes full advantage of the Nokia N8's hardware acceleration to deliver a faster and more responsive user interface. Symbian^3 also raises the bar in performance by delivering greater memory management allowing more applications to run in parallel for a faster multi-tasking experience. It remains to be seen how much of an actual enhancement does Symbian^3 bring to the end user experience.

The N8 is fully social networking ready. Users can update their status, share location and photos, and view live feeds from Facebook and Twitter in a single app directly on the home screen. Calendar events from social networks can also be transferred to the device calendar.

The phone has a 3.5-inch capacitive screen with a 360x640 resolution. While the resolution might not be very high compared to Android based devices, the AMOLED display will make it look quite impressive. The device in its prototype avatar had a non standard sized HDMI port, we seriously hope this has been rectified in the final version. Even with all these features, the phone manges to stay quite slim at just 12.9 mm thin!

The N8 will be available in select markets during the third quarter of 2010. It is estimated to be priced at around the EUR 370 (Rs. 22,000) mark. This is the price minus taxes or subsidies. Also, it would be outright foolish to expect this phone to be priced below the 25k mark in India - so don't get your hopes too high.