Mobile circuit and guide

Nokia 808 PureView review Countrys best

As Nokias Symbian hardware development comes to an end, its long awaited "Game Changer" device has finally hit the UK streets with its killer camera.

Although the Nokia N8 has long held the crown of the Finnish firms best camera phone available, the Nokia 808 PureView has arrived with its 41MP camera.

The amount of hardware required to support its functionality causes the Nokia 808 PureView to weigh in at a hefty 169g - compared with the 140g iPhone 4S, 133g Samsung Galaxy S3 and 130g HTC One X.



As well as its weight, the Nokia 808 PureView - with its 4" AMOLED ClearBlack display - isnt exactly small measuring 123.9mm x 60.2mm x 13.9mm (expanding to 17.95mm at the camera bulge) compared with the slim iPhone 4S (9.3mm), One X (8.9mm) and S3 (8.6mm).

The Nokia 808 Pureview looks and feels like the old Nokia 5800 with a hint of the more recent Nokia Lumia 610 although both were smaller, more compact, flat-backed phones.



Although the 5800 and Lumia 610 appeared a little cheap in appearance, which was reflected in their purchase price, this is not the case for the Nokia 808 PureView with its £500 pricetag (black £519.99 or white £489.99).



The main reason for this high retail price is that none of the UK operators have decided to offer the Nokia 808 PureView, meaning that it is only available via Amazon at the SIM free, unbranded price.

Although this seems a high price to pay for a phone, when you compare it with the iPhone 4S 16GB the 808 Purview is pretty much the same, although the HTC One X weighs in 10 percent cheaper than both Nokias and Apples offering.

The Nokia 808 PureView uses Symbian Belle Feature Pack 1 (FP1) as its backbone operating system (OS) which is the latest incarnation of the Symbian^3 platform which initially released on the Nokia N8 and is based on many years of Symbian development.



As with Symbian Belle you can add an extra two Homescreens to the default 4 user configurable screens, or delete them to reduce down to the minimum of one.

Transitions between landscape and portrait screen orientation, when the phone is rotated, are a little more polished in the latest Belle FP1 OS, with the screen image zooming out slightly when rotating, and then expanding in its new orientation.

When it comes to homescreen widgets, the Nokia 808 PureView comes well stocked, out of the box, with 46 widget options once the Social and Maps apps have been updated and the Microsoft Office apps have been installed via Software Update.

These include clock, calendar, contacts and mail options as well as; four Social App options (Social app, Facebook, Facebook Summary and Twitter), five Maps Suite options, six media related options plus a whole host of others for you to play around with.



With so many widgets on offer, you may be a little disappointed that youre limited to just six homescreens, as you could easily fill more than that if you wished.

There is a useful Mobile Data Tracker which displays either the total amount of mobile data used since resetting counters, or the ability to set it to display the amount of data allowance remaining in a user defined period.

The Nokia Recommends widget is really just a full width app icon, wasting screen real estate which opens the namesake app providing lists of the top albums and tracks which can be purchased from the Nokia Music Store.

Although Symbian Anna and Belle brought a more Android-looking OS, the major disappointment for long standing Symbian users is that whilst Apple finally acknowledged the advantage of folders in the Main Menu, Nokia has reduced this same functionality removing folder in folder support in the Main Menu structure.



The initial out of the box appearance of the main menu has all apps in a flat structure which can be either user "arranged" or automatically sorted in alphabetical order via either a long press in the main window or tapping on the menu button (bottom right).

A further disappointment is that all folders have the same basic icon making it harder to differentiate at a glance.

Luckily two third party apps are available from the Nokia Store to counter this, in the form of FolderIcon and Thumbnail Folders which enable the user to assign their own folder icons or replace the folder icons with new icons showing thumbnails generated from the apps contained within.

Another function we miss on Windows Phone and iOS is the profile support provided on Symbian, which can be automated by installing the third party Situations apps from the Nokia Store enabling automatic switching between profiles including silencing the Nokia 808 PureView at night and switching on/off Power Save mode.

But additional to this simple example, a number of phone settings (Profile switching, Mobile Data toggle, WiFi toggle, BT toggle, Power Save toggle, SMS reply and App lauching) can be switched based on time, calendar events, connectivity (WiFi/BT) or location (Cell Tower/GPS).