Nokia has undergone something of an identity crisis in recent years. While they may be considered the world’s largest mobile handset manufacturer, poor smartphone and Western market sales are being buoyed by the cheap handset hungry emerging markets and it is these phones that have kept Nokia up there. They’ve also chopped and changed just about every top position within the organisation in a bid to try and compete more closely with the likes of Apple and other manufacturers. To put it simply, they want a piece of the smartphone pie and they hope that then N8 will help bring it to them.
The Nokia N8, of course, runs on the Symbian operating system albeit in its latest guise and aside from that you can enjoy a very impressive 12mp camera with the usual Carl Zeiss optics. It has a 3.7 inch AMOLED capacitative touch screen and 16GB of memory so on paper it has the credential to help drag Nokia kicking and screaming into the 21st century of mobile phone wars.
The Nokia N8 has been released today and you can, according to their website, get one sim free from the Nokia Store for a princely sum of £429. Alternatively, if you’re willing to sign a 10 year contract (give or take 8 1/2 years) you can have one for £35 a month with T-Mobile including 900 minutes and unlimited(ish) Internet data. Three are offering the same free handset for the same monthly price but with them you get 1,000 minutes and a more transparent 1GB of Internet usage.
Quite whether the Nokia N8 will be the saviour of Nokia that they hope it will be remains to be seen. Will it attract businessmen to dump their Blackerry or the fanboi to dump their iPhone? Probably not, but maybe it will attract a third, as yet unidentified group of smartphone users.
