They say that imitation is one of the greatest forms of flattery. If that’s the case, there’s probably a few guys in Finland blushing right about now. Amidst all the iPhone clones that populate the streets of China, you’ll also find this clever little devil. It may look like a real Nokia N8, but it’s not. For starters, it runs on Google Android 2.1.

Many people have long since said that Nokia should be adopting Google’s smartphone platform if it hopes to regain some of the ground it has lost to its competitors. Nokia itself might not be listening, but its Chinese knockoff counterparts appear to be. What’s more, this Nokia N8 clone comes powered with a dual core processor to boot.

To be fair, it’s only a 600MHz Rockchips ARM 9 chip under the hood (I’ve never even heard of Rockchips). By comparison, the real N8 is rocking an ARM 11 680MHz processor. With the slightly upgraded hardware, the knockoff is said to play 720p HD video without a hitch. It also has dual-LED flash, microSD slot, WiFi, GPS, and a G-sensor.

Aside from the obvious concerns over reliability and quality, some other shortcomings befall the clone. The 12MP Carl Zeiss shooter has been replaced with just a 5.0 megapixel camera. The 3.5-inch display stays the same size, but the AMOLED capacitive tech has been swapped out for some resisitive touchscreen action.

No exact price has been announced, but the flyer is indicating something in the 1XXX RMB (Chinese Yuan or Renminbi) range. If it is 1000 RMB, that’d peg it at US$150.

[Mic Gadget via Yesky]

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Nokia is still the largest cell phone maker in the world, but it’s quickly losing market share to Android devices, the Apple iPhone, and other suitable alternatives. The company needs to innovate and come up with something new and exciting. Their apparent answer? The Nokia N8.

Features and Highlights

On paper, this smartphone certainly has a lot going for it. The 3.5-inch multitouch display is an AMOLED, making for some brilliantly vibrant colors. The embedded camera is an impressive 12-megapixels, including 720p HD video recording, autofocus, Carl Zeiss optics, and xenon flash. It’s got HDMI-out, a secondary VGA camera, and five-band HSDPA. That all sounds really good.

The overall design and build quality is quite good too. You get a cool aluminum shell and the construction feels really solid in your hands. The unibody design means that there is no user-replaceable battery, much like the iPhone, but you can tell right away that you are holding a premium device.

Much like other Nokia smartphones these days, it also has a spring-loaded slider switch on the side for locking and unlocking the screen. The SIM and microSD card slots along the left side offer an interesting design too, since the SIM slot is spring-loaded.

A Little Behind the Times

That’s all good stuff, but the Nokia N8 is certainly not without its shortcomings. For starters, it’s still rocking the Symbian^3 operating system. From what I understand, this is pretty much the swan song for the platform as Nokia moves ahead with MeeGo and other options. Compared to the innovations offered by Android and iOS, though, Symbian^3 feels decidedly dated in its approach. It’s close, but not close enough.

Even though this phone only has a 680MHz processor, especially since we’re in an era of 1GHz smartphone, I never really felt like the performance was terribly lacking. Webpages loaded quite quickly and I was able to make good use of the “Social” app for my Facebook and Twitter updates. It’s surprisingly snappy for what it is, but it would have been nice to see a faster processor. Even at the lower clock speed, I was barely able to eek one full day of moderate use on a single charge of the internal battery.

A Real Digital Camera (Almost)

The real star of this phone, however, is the 12-megapixel camera. We’re not just talking about resolution here either, as the picture quality was quite impressive… so long as you don’t use the flash. An outdoor shot on a slightly cloudy day came out pretty great, but an indoor photo with flash ends up looking washed out and almost “hazy” by comparison.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, I can’t say that the Nokia N8 is a bad phone. It’s actually quite good. The AMOLED display is brilliant, the haptic feedback and on-screen keyboard are quite usable, and the 12MP camera is quite impressive (under the right conditions). The OS still needs some work to be friendlier to regular consumers and the web browser isn’t the best, though. I’m also not a fan of how the camera sticks out from the back of the phone. Couldn’t they make it flush?

I don’t think that I can recommend an outright purchase for an unlocked Nokia N8 direct from Nokia (like the sample device used for this review). That said, the version being sold through Rogers is less than $100 on contract. You get a lot of phone for your money, but just know that you’ll feel kind of dated (with the OS) right off the get-go even though it is the first Symbian^3 device to be released. In the US it’s not subsidized by a carrier, so you’re looking at $529 for the N8, but it’s yours outright.

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You may have already seen some European variants on this phone, but this is the first time that the phone is going to be offered in Canada with a complete carrier subsidy. Much like the iPhone, it boasts a high-resolution touchscreen, but it goes with AMOLED tech instead. The “industrial” design is a nice touch too.

A quick refresher shows us a 680MHz processor, Symbian^3, 16GB memory, WiFi, 12MP camera with Carl Zeiss lens, and 720p video recording capability. On paper, it outshines a lot of phones, particularly when it comes to that camera.

There’s no word on a release date or proposed pricing, but it is selling for 370 Euro on that other continent, which would convert to an outright price of $530. If that’s the case, a contract price of under $200 could be very possible.

SOURCE: Mobile Syrup

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Nokia N8 smartphone with Symbian S^3 platform

As a quick refresher, the Nokia N8 comes powered by Symbian ^3 and an ARM 11 680MHz processor. The spec sheet is certainly drool-worthy with the 3.5-inch AMOLED capacitive touchscreen, 16GB internal storage, 12MP camera with 720p HD video, secondary VGA videocall camera, microSD expansion slot, HSDPA 10.2Mbps, HSUPA 2.0Mbps, WiFi, Bluetooth 3.0 with A2DP, stereo FM radio with RDS, HDMI-out, Dolby Digital Plus, digital compass, video/photo editor, and Flash Lite 4.0.

As an added bonus, you get free turn-by-turn navigation using Ovi Maps, the same free service you can get with something like the Nokia N97 mini.

Delivery of the device won’t happen until the end of September, but you can hit up the official page on the Nokia website to place your preorder. It will set you back $549, with either standard ($3.99) or express ($9.99) shipping options.

What do you think? The Nokia N8 beats a lot of devices on paper, but is it good enough to stand up in a marketplace populated by high-end Droids and retina displays?

Nokia N8 [Nokia]

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