Of course, more sane individuals will want to get the US version here instead. :)
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Camera, Camera, Camera!
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The camera is obviously the main attraction, and is in itself is worth the money! It is as simple as that. If the 808 were sold as a standalone camera, it would handily beat just about every point-and-shoot camera in nearly every way. Even when shooting at 5MP or 8MP, it easily outclasses even more "pro" compacts such as the Canon G12.
The one seeming deficiency that the 808 PureView would have when compared to those dedicated camera is a lack of optical zoom. This, clearly, has to do with size - there is no way to fit in the optics required, especially when considering the sheer size of the photo sensor included with this phone. To give you an idea, the sensor is twice the size of the G12, whose 5x optical zoom already gives it a 2-inch thick body when retracted. And compared to most "ultra-zoom" cameras (such as the Canon SX IS series), the sensor in the 808 is 3-4 times as large!
Enter the genius of Nokia's "PureView" technology. This gives you, among other things, "Lossless" digital zoom. (Yeah there are quotes, I'll get back to why).
At full resolution, pictures taken with this phone consist of 34 or 38 megapixels (in 16:9 and 4:3 aspect ratios, respectively). At that resolution, the size of each pixel is equivalent to that of recent 8MP smart phones such as the iPhone 4S or the Samsung Galaxy series. Obviously, photos from those phones can be a bit... meeh... especially in low light conditions. So yeah, scaling up from 8MP of random noise to 38MP of random noise is not really the value proposition Nokia was going for here.
Instead, in "PureView" mode, you will be capturing 8MP, 5MP or even 3MP photos - and you will be amazed! Amazed at how much information is available despite the lower resolution, at the color "depth" that comes with a much wider dynamic range, and amazed at why the world still thinks more MP == better. You'll truly appreciate how it's not the pixel count that matters, but how you use them.
The idea is that by "binning" several pixels (photo cells) together into larger "super-pixels", each resulting pixel receives more light (signal), whereas most of the noise associated with shifting and reading the signal from the CCD remains constant. In turn, this means less noise per pixel, shorter exposure times, less blur. Less noise also means more efficient compression, resulting in even smaller file sizes (despite the cleaner picture!).
So why not simply use a cheaper 5MP or 8MP sensor then? So long as the total sensor area is the same, wouldn't you get the same benefits?
There are at least two reasons for this. First, would you even be looking at this phone it it was marketed with a "5 Megapixel Camera"? For all that we decry the marketing race for higher megapixel numbers despite the resulting deterioration in image quality, we are still allowing ourselves to be fooled by it. By placing a "41 Megapixel" label on this thing, Nokia is essentially using metrics that give you a faily accurate representation of its camera performance vis a vis other smart phones in the market today.
The second reason is that this allows for the aforementioned "lossless" digital zoom. In other smart phones (with the exception of video recording modes on the Nokia N8, Sony Ericsson C905a, and a couple of others), once you start to zoom in, you are in effect "scaling up" an image from its native pixel resolution, just as you would if you enlarged a picture in an image editing program. You are not adding any detail, you are only blurring the original.
In contrast, the 808 digital zoom works by reducing the size of each "super-pixel", down all the way to its native resolution. So at the far end of the zoom range, you are essentially using only the center portion of the sensor, cropped such that 1 photo cell corresponds exactly to 1 pixel in the resulting image. In simplified terms, you could say that you reduce or eliminate the "oversampling" that PureView otherwise provides.
This, combined with the phone's aspheric lens design and other ingenious solutions, allows for optical performance way its physical size would normally indicate. In fact, in a side-by-side blind test conducted by GSMArena.com, it went on to score higher than the Olympus PEN E-PL2 DSLR camera with its humungous "four thirds" inch photo sensor (about 2.5x larger than that of the 808). Granted, these were mostly daytime/outdoor photos at the wide range etc etc -- but the fact that this can even happen speaks volumes!
One thing I have not yet mentioned is the awesome video and audio recording quality of this phone. Unless you have professional video recording equipment usually reserved for movie studios and broadcasters, there is nothing else no the market that matches the richness in both video and sound (frequency range, dynamic range) that this thing gives.
The perfect travel companion
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If you are traveling, this is really the one gadget you want to bring with you! Some reasons:
* The camera - obviously! You can safely leave your dedicated camera or camcorder at home.
* Nokia Maps. Free navigation, phenomenal map/POI coverage. Unlike Google Maps, map data is stored in vector format, so it is much less data intensive (both for download and storage). In fact, data can be stored offline beforehand, so you don't need any data connection at all to use it.
* Other preinstalled Nokia applications, such as Nokia Guides (city guides, restaurant guides, etc) and Nokia Public Transport (very nice and useful if looking for public transit options near you).
* Worldwide 3G coverage. This is one of very few phones, like the N8 before it, that has penta-band UMTS network support, meaning it works on any GSM carrier's 3G network worldwide (including both AT&T and T-Mobile USA).
* Multiple tethering options. You can share your phone's internet connection with a laptop or tablet over USB, Bluetooth or WiFi (ordered from most to least power efficient).
* Multiple ways to connect to TV sets to share photos, videos, etc, including HMDI, DNLA, and plain old RGB output for analogue TVs. A dedicated "Nokia Big Screen" application provides a nice media centric interface, and can be paired with and controlled by Wii or PlayStation remote control.
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Symbian is Dead - Long Live Symbian!
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In 2010, Nokia's Board of Directors hired Microsoft puppet Stephen Elop in order to kill Symbian, and turn Nokia into little more than a tool in Microsoft's own last-ditch effort to make their own Windows platform again relevant on mobile phones. So why, then, did they now resurrect Symbian from the grave, only to release their newest flagship phone on it!? This seems utterly confusing, even considering Nokia's typical schizophrenic personality.
The bottom line is that Symbian was their only OS that could handle the massive amount of processing required for decent camera and especially video recording performance. They have spent 5 years on developing PureView, exploiting every advantage that the lightweight Symbian OS offers; it is not trivial to get this working on other platforms, let alone Windows Phone.
Now, they have in fact indicated that while they WILL eventually relase the PureView technology on their Windows Lumia phones - however these will initially NOT have the same pixel resolution and optical performance as the 808. Until processor speeds catch up a bit more, this is likely to remain the case.
So much the better for us Symbian fans. In fact, I'll stick my neck out a little: Symbian is the greatest (mainstream) mobile operating system created so far!
Part of the reason is technical, as described below. But just as important, all of its main rivals (Android, iOS, Windows Phone, even BlackBerry) carry with them somewhat uncomfortable tie-ins to their vendor, whether it be:
* excessive coercion and control of what you can and cannot do with your phone (looking at you, Apple!)
* excessive dependency on vendor-controlled services to transmit and store your personal data. Are you comfortable with the way that Android leads to you to use Google services for contact synchronization, emails, and even implicit uploading of photos (often without your explicit knowledge or consent), especially given Google's ever-more aggressive marketing focus?
Among these, Symbian remains the most open system, where you, the user, remain in control of your device and the data on it. To me, this is just as important as any technical reason.
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Connectivity
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Symbian has always been ahead with regards to connectivity options. For instance, as previously mentioned, it supports TV connectivity via HDMI, DNLA or plain old TV-out. It also has the most complete Bluetooth stack found anywhere:
* When playing music to your car stereo, track information is also shown (if supported by your stereo)
* Bluetooth HID for keyboard and mouse support since the N95.
* As soon as you pair with your computer, you can instantly browse the phone's filesystem just like any other storage volume.
That said, the 808 brings with it a couple of disappointments compared to previous Nokia phones:
* Dwindling Mac support: Since Apple have removed the iSync application from Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion), Nokia no longer builds iSync plugins for their phones (even for those of us who run older versions of OS X). Also, Nokia Multimedia Transfer does not seem to receive updates anymore, and so does not recognize this phone. This means that synchronizing your phone with the Mac Address Book, Calendar, iTunes and iPhoto is a bit more cumbersome than before. Workarounds exist, but they are a bit klunky - similar to how you would do it on an Android device.
* WebDAV support has been removed from the File Manager. This means that you need 3rd party software (e.g. PaderSync FM, myExplorer, or Davi) to access remote file shares.
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Stuck in Time
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Since Nokia are putting less effort into Symbian these days, we cannot expect to see much in the way of new features in the OS. For instance:
* No 4G (LTE) network support. In fact, this phone only supports speeds up to 14.4 Mbps (HSDPA), not even the 22 Mbps HSPA+ technology that T-Mobile USA (misleadingly) labels "4G". Then again, everything about this phone is less data intensive than on Android: Offline maps/navigation, map data stored as vector data and not images, no automatic (and unwilling?) synchronization of photos with Google+, etc.
* No multi-core CPU support. However, Symbian is very lightweight when it comes to resource use, and unlike Android, does not really NEED any more CPU cores to be usable. Certain tasks, such as video recording, are aided via a dedicated DSP.
* Screen resolution is WVGA (640x360 pixels). Most people won't notice, but it does not look good on phone reviews where the reviewer (literally!) puts the screen under a magnifying glass.
* The standard web browser is getting a bit long in the tooth, and not really performing by today's standards. You can get some speed boost by installing Opera Mobile or Opera Mini, but in that case you loose support for Adobe Flash.
That said, the UI has undergone quite a bit of polish leading up to Nokia Belle (the version of Symbian that's included here). Similar to Nokia's own Maemo/MeeGo OSes as well as Android, home screen widgets are now resizable; a notification panel can be dragged down from the top, etc.
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Dwindling Application Support
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As you would expect, once Elop announced the end of Symbian, and moreover, that the Qt application environment would NOT be ported to Windows Phone, he also completely removed any remaining incentive for application developers to support this platform.
Some example of how lackluster developers have become:
* There are 3 flavors of Angry Birds, but despite being a Finnish company that initially developed for Nokia, ROVIA could not even be bothered to deploy Angry Birds Space on this platform once Elop had made his announcement. There is 1 flavor of "Cut the Rope", not 2 as on iOS and Android.
* There is no Netflix application. There WAS a Netflix Queue manager, but after Netflix changed their API, they could not be bothered to change their Symbian application to match.
* There is no IMDB, Fandango or other application to browse movie listings and show times. Google search works somewhat, but is a bit klunky.
* Skype supports voice calls, but not video. MAYBE this will happen now that Skype is owned by Nokia's new sugar daddy, but I would not hold my breath. Meanwhile, there is always Fring or Nimbuzz.
That said, many of Nokia's own applications are very nice, and often unexpectedly useful. For example:
* Nokia Situations, available from Nokia Beta Labs. This switches your profile, desktop background, sound themes, etc based on conditions such as GPS Location, WiFi access point, calendar entries, time of day. I have my phone set up to automatically turn to "Meeting" mode (muted ring tone, vibrations) while in meetings, and Offline once I arrive at my home.
* Nokia Drop, also from Beta Labs. It comes with an accompanying plugin for web browsers such as Firefox, and allows you to "drop" files, URLs, etc to your phone in one click. If browsing the OVI Store from your computer, for instance, just select "Install on Phone", and it happens automatically.
* Wellness Diary, also from Beta Labs. Once it is installed, it uses the accelerometer and some nifty logic to count your steps, similar to a pedometer, and records a diary for you. In combination with the Sports Tracker application (also originally developed by Nokia, but now available for iOS and Android as well), this provides an excellent way to keep track of your physical activity.
* Car Mode, available in the OVI Store. Makes the phone easier to use while driving. The main screen consist of only 3 large buttons: Call, Drive and Music. Can be set up to launch automatically once connected to your Bluetooth car stereo.
* Nokia Battery Monitor, which among other things keeps track of which applications consume power (when active and in the background).
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The Bottom Line
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I realize that a lot of what I have been describing in this review is not going to matter to your typical "causal" phone user, the kind that Steve Jobs managed to wean off their RAZRs and into the "smartphone" world (if you could call the original iPhone a "smartphone", that is). For instance, both Apple and Google seem to be deliberately taking advantage of the fact that most users do not care much about privacy, or "power" features such as proper multi-tasking. Most of those users will likely also be "OK" with the camera quality in other smartphones, and are likely to care more about CPU frequencies, screen sizes, application support, etc.
So admittedly, I am likely in a small to moderate size niche for which this device will appeal. Given that, for what it is, I could not be happier with any other device than what I am with this phone today!
There is always room for more of us!
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