Nokia N8 and Belle - The Power of Cool

At the time of its worldwide release on 1st October 2010, the Nokia N8 was by far the best piece of hardware in the smartphone market. Sure, its design was not quite as cool as the iPhone's. But it had a powerful 680 MHz processor and 3D Graphics GPU along with 16 MB of on-board memory and a long lasting battery. Most importantly, it had a 12 MP main camera with Carl Zeiss optics that still remains unmatched in terms of picture quality

But in spite of all this, the Nokia N8 failed to set the smartphone market on fire due to its operating system - the dated and unintuitive Symbian S3, which even in 2010 was considered old-fashioned and uncool. Even the much-touted Symbian Anna update failed to enthuse smartphone owners, as it did not live up to the standards set by iOS and Android. But the new Symbian Belle update may change things around, at least for committed Nokia owners

The process of upgrading from Anna to Belle took me more than 1 hour and consumed about 300 MB of bandwidth. But boy was it worth the effort! The first change I noticed was the look and feel. The 6 home screens (up from the earlier 3) look hyper cool, with neat widgets in up to 5 different sizes, along with the tried and trusted app shortcuts. The new wallpapers provided by Nokia are very good. The default Clock and Calendar widgets rock!

The bottom of the screen has 3 buttons instead of 2 (Menu in addition to Options and Call). This is not useful on the N8 but would help on other phones without a Menu button. To scroll between homescreens, you need to flick your finger sideways, as the screen change button has disappeared. At the top is a thin panel showing the service provider name and a tiny digital time display, along with icons for battery, signal strength, 3G or  Wi-Fi connection, etc.

Touch this top panel and flick your finger downwards to reach a new screen where you can turn on/off your mobile data , Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connections, and also switch to Silent mode with a single touch. All those who have struggled to reach the Connection Manager in Symbian S3, to turn off 3G connections, would agree that this new facility is a life-saver. But one problem is that this screen tends to open up whenever the phone touches your ear during a call

That's just a small glitch but a major one with Belle is that it is much, much heavier than the Symbian S3 for which the Nokia N8 was designed. As soon as you complete the OS upgrade (which by the way can only be done using the latest version of the Nokia Suite), you see a visible drop in the UI's performance due to the lack of free phone memory. The quick fix for this is to uninstall any bloated applications that you can live without (Social being a prime culprit)

Some other minor issues include slow playback of multimedia content and problems with some kinds of .flv files. While the former is understandable, considering most new smartphones have powerful dual or even quad core processors, the latter is something Nokia needs to look at. But all things considered, the Belle update has given a new lease of life to my ageing N8. Now I may be less easily tempted by the new Sony Experia S and its 12 MP snapper