Followers of Nokia will know well enough that the Finnish manufacturer hasn’t come out with any ground-breaking smartphones for sometime.

Will the N8 fair any better?

Look & Feel
The phone looks overly large, measuring at 113.5 x 59 x 12.9 mm, but it’s in fact very nice to hold in the hand and not even as weighty as an iPhone 4, say, at just 135g. The frame is covered in anodised aluminium which is scratch resistant so no more nasty nicks on your beautiful new phone. It also gives the phone that metallic gleam which is so pleasing to the eye.

You won’t be able to remove the battery on this handset as it is screwed in. So this must mean Nokia are confident this powerhouse of a smartphone won’t have any hardware crashes that needs you to remove the battery easily – which can only be a good thing, right?

Camera
The 12 megapixel camera is the main selling point of the Nokia N8 which is backed by the bold claim that it is the best camera on a phone in the world. Even on early models the snaps taken were highly impressive and certainly seemed the best we’d ever seen, particularly helped by a Xenon Flash and Carl Zeiss optics.

Video recording is HD and if you do as it is says and view is 720p you can see the brilliant results below for yourself in a Nokia viral video.

Dual microphones matched with the HD video recording makes this the best video recording experience you will find. Pretty nice, eh?

Media
To store all your media you have a massive 16Gb internal memory and you can even watch any media on your TV via an HDMI port at the top of the N8 – a very cool addition we thought. Playing from your phone onto the TV is surprisingly fantastic and you won’t notice much difference from streaming from a laptop as the 1Ghz processor keeps the experience judder free.

The N8 is also quick and slick for music playing and will most likely support Comes with Music where Nokia owners can download instantly from millions of tracks.

Interface
We come to the last point and we haven’t really spoken about the interface yet, because although the N8 runs on the latest version of Symbian it’s really no different. In the menu screen and general navigation looks just like a N97 display and that’s not a good thing. The interface, sadly, is a let down and will do the job, for sure, but is still looking dated.

Verdict
The N8 is an all-round fantastic phone experience and at most of the points where we thought the Nokia N8 would let us down, it prevailed: Media playing was clean and quick whilst the size and shape was comfortable to hold and use. And to top it off the camera – much as Nokia would like to hear – really is the best we’ve ever used and seen.

I just REALLY REALLY wish Nokia would update / get rid of / destroy / terminate / obliterate their old Symbian OS.