How would you improve the Nokia N8?

Published by Steve Litchfield at 10:46 UTC, January 30th 2012

Summary:

It's somewhat amazing that the Nokia N8 remains in the top tier of smartphones a full 16 months after release - it's fair to say that this is almost entirely due to its camera, with perhaps build quality and gadget-complement contributing too. But no phone can go on forever. If you were Nokia and wanted to produce an "N8 mark II", what would you add/tweak? What's practical? What's worthwhile?

I should stress up front that I've no knowledge of Nokia's plans for 2012. We know that it is committed to Windows Phone now, as well as Symbian, the latter in 'franchise' status (a term I still find confusing), but I for one am still optimistic for a couple of last great Symbian smartphones announced this year. Is it possible that one of these could be high end and succeed the amazingly popular N8? Of all the Symbian^3/Anna phones, it's the only one that has really made waves, the only one that has endeared itself to millions of users.

So... sitting down with the N8, how would I improve it? And yes, I know that product timescales dictate that this very (hypothetical) thought process would have had to have taken place inside Nokia a good year (or more) ago, but the exercise is still worthwhile here, if only to recognise that even the mighty N8 has shortcomings and to consider practical ways that it could have been bettered.

Let's call this imaginary new device the N8-X...

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Form factor

There's general agreement that the N8 form factor is just about perfect, in terms of size and feel in the hand. The use of metal is uniformly praised, the device is very tough (I've dropped mine countless times) and I'd class the N8 as 'reassuringly heavy'(!) The screen bezel on the N8 is such that a 3.7" or 3.8" display could be squeezed in fairly easily for the N8-X, taking the phone closer to the 4" screen 'sweet spot' of today's  competing Android smartphones (plus the upcoming 'iPhone 5' is rumoured to be around the 4" screen mark).

Screen

At (say) 3.7" diagonal, Symbian nHD (640 by 360 pixels) would still work quite well in terms of pixel density. If Symbian was still being developed with a high budget and many future devices, I'd suspect that we might see pixel doubling to 1280 by 720 displays on 4" and 4.3"-screened devices, but even with Accenture on board for development now, I think it's a little late in the day to radically overhaul Symbian's basic screen resolution - so nHD it is.

The N8, famously (along with the C7), missed out on the ClearBlack Display revolution, being specified just a few months too early in the grand scheme of things, so the N8-X would have CBD, making for clearer, higher contrast visuals, indoors and outdoors. In fact, there might as well be an oleophobic coating as well - this worked well on the C7.

It goes without saying that the N8-X should have Gorilla Glass - the N8 was pioneering here and the technology is now more or less standard in the smartphone world.

OS

Symbian Nokia Belle, of course, the latest iteration of Symbian, with the most 2012-friendly touch UI yet. Some of its design points are a little alienating to long-time Symbian users, but I reckon it's well worth getting over these points in order to gain the performance improvements under the hood and in main applications. Plus increasing amounts of software, both utilities (latest Nokia Social) and HD games are appearing and requiring Belle as a minimum.

Combined with a slightly larger and even clearer AMOLED screen, Belle should prove quite palatable on an N8-X, even set against the eye candy of huge 720p displays on some of the (significantly larger and less pocketable) Android competition and the 'retina' iPhone 4. Display technology certainly won't lead the world (though CBD is nice), but it'll easily be 'good enough'.

Processor, memory

Although Symbian is generally pretty good at multitasking, there's no doubt that it could be snappier. Belle will help with this, of course, but in the N8-X I'd be looking for the same 1GHz chip as in the 701, together with its faster GPU and the 512MB of RAM (double what's in the N8, of course). 

The N8-X, like the N8, should also have the best of both worlds in terms of mass memory and expansion via microSD. I don't think the current '16GB plus card' arrangement should be touched, to be honest - every time Nokia has moved to 32GB mass memory we've hit performance problems and they're simply not worth it. With the card expansion as well, anyone who needs an extra 32GB can simply pop in a card as needed.

Camera

As good as the N8's camera is, with a huge 1/1.83" sensor and Xenon flash, the very fact that anyone appreciates why it's good will see them wanting even more. Although the best of the competition just jumped to 16 megapixels that kind of resolution on a sensor in a phone isn't really warranted - the law of diminishing returns definitely hits somewhere around the 12 megapixel mark, even with 2012 sensor technology.

So what would I want from the N8-X's camera? To be honest, not a lot extra. Maybe the sensor could be made larger still, perhaps 1/1.5" - which in turn would mean that 16 megapixels would actually make sense. The optics are already excellent, but I would ask for basic camera glass protection, as on the N95, N82 and N86 - hang the extra millimetre, not having to wipe the glass free of fingerprints before every photo would be a big convenience for me. And there's the really nice feature that opening the sliding protection could start the Camera app, just as on the older models quoted.

And yes, I realise that a larger sensor and camera glass protection would necessitate a slightly thicker 'hump' on the N8-X's back, but this is a specialised smartphone and every purchaser will hopefully know exactly what they're buying - not everyone aspires to a phone that's razor thin.

Having a proper Xenon flash, 100 times brighter than LED, was a major feature of the N8 camera but it was let down ever so slightly by being dimmer than that on the N82 (for example). It's all relative, but I'd like a bigger Xenon unit, something which could light up a room like that on the N82 could, rather than just nearby subjects. With the extra camera hump thickness on the N8-X, fitting in a larger Xenon flash module and capacitor should be no problem.

Battery

Definitely a change needed here. The 'integral' battery system of the N8 simply doesn't work, in my view. Although brave souls can change the BL-4D battery if armed with the right screwdriver, running out of power for most people means having to wait until the device can be charged again. All of which I don't understand, since the N8's twin sister device, the C7, with identical core specifications, manages to have a battery door and removable battery and yet its body is still a good millimetre or so thinner.

In short, there's no reason whatsoever why our hypothetical N8-X shouldn't have a metal battery door, C7/701-style, and the savvy photo-centric user can simply pop a charged, spare battery in a pocket in case power runs out after a lot of shooting while out and about.

In fact, with virtually the same width and thinner than the C7's BL-5K, I can't see why the 'hero' BP-4L Li-Poly battery shouldn't be used in this new device (hey, why not shoot for the moon)? With 1500mAh, I don't see why the N8-X would ever really run short of juice before the end of even a busy day.

Speaker(s)

The N8 comes with a loudspeaker that's a cut above the rest of the smartphone pack, with a larger cone and a power amplifier similar to that in the likes of the old Nokia 5800 and X6. While good enough, while we're redesigning the N8, why not put in an extra speaker, matching the two older music phones? After all, the N82 (the N8's spiritual predecessor) had loud stereo speakers, so let's put the same units either end of the new N8-X. You'd be surprised how often having a decent set of speakers helps in a phone...

2012 must-haves

Aside from the remarks above, there's not that much else the N8-X needs to hold its head high in the 2012 phone world - NFC is the big omission in the current N8, explained by the device's specifications being set in stone before NFC was available to the designers, no doubt. So the N8-X would have to have NFC, for tapping to share, pair, and so on - NFC in Symbian Belle is more advanced than on any other mobile OS, so it's a shoe-in on our hypothetical device.

 

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So there we have the Nokia N8-X, my personal wishlist for what Nokia could create in an N8 successor. Not that anything I've said here will have any influence of course - as I said earlier, for an N8 successor to be announced this year, the design would have been set in concrete way back at the very start of 2011. But I can still dream....

Steve Litchfield, All About Symbian, 30 January 2012

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