August 10, 2010
By Donovan Jackson

Smartphones today continue to impress the pants off of the public, especially each time a new model is introduced. With the Nokia N8, that level of awe has to ratchet up a good few notches. In this, certainly the best Nokia ever to see the light of day, everything – and that means absolutely everything – about the device appears to be engineered to perfection. Ergonomically and aesthetically, it raises the bar in terms of materials and construction: from the case, which starts out as a single piece of anodized aluminium, to the buttons, to the screen, Nokia’s N8 is designed to be the best.

Feature-wise, the N8 packs enough for at least four blogs, so we’ll save some of the good stuff for later. But as digital cameras and the ability to share (through Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, among other sites) becomes a priority for more people than ever before, we’ll start with this aspect of the master Nokia.

Twelve megapixels. That’s right, the N8 delivers a massive 12 megapixels resolution, through Carl Zeiss optics and with a Xenon flash, capable too, of recording HD video. That’s better than some purpose-designed, latest and greatest digital cameras.

The international ‘Conversations with Nokia’ website has a very informative blog which gives complete details on the Nokia N8 camera, covering everything from how the camera works, why (and how) the step up to 12 megapixels, what to expect in terms of image quality (and video quality) and more.

What’s more, this smartphone has an HDMI-output. That means not only sharing your sharp, detailed images online, it also means sharing them in the living room, on your plasma or LCD high-def television. That port further means you can, in theory, chuck out the DVD player in favour of the smartphone: you can play HD movies by saving them to a MicroSD card, inserting into the Nokia and hitting play. Could this be the way of the future? The smartphone as a portable entertainment centre, ready to be hooked to any available screen to play back any digital content?

Related to the powerful camera and HD video capture capability is the Nokia N8’s impressive memory specifications. It comes standard with 16GB built-in, which is expandable to 48GB. That should provide plenty of capacity to store the images, video and voice that the N8 is ready to record. What’s certain, even at this early stage, is that the Nokia N8 is perhaps the most exciting smartphone to come out of Nokia – and perhaps the most exciting smartphone ever, period.

Click here to order the Nokia N8 online at Nokia Stuff