N8 – Q & A session

If you missed it yesterday (27-04-2010), you must have been asleep or stranded in the Kalahari desert, because it was big news and it was all over the internet. In fact the newly announce Nokia N8 mobile camera phone started trending on twitter in no time at all.

For those of you that don’t know this will be Nokia’s first Symbian ^3 device and will boast the best camera in Nokias arsenal of phones.

Without getting to much into the full tech spec, here are some of the highlights:

• A massive 12mega pixel camera with face detection
• nHD OLED screen at 3.5inch.
• multi-touch capasitive screen

And here is what this babies camera can do, thanks to Nokia conversation for the untouched images.

(Click to Enlarge)

Below is the Promo N8 video sit back and enjoy:

(more videos can be found over at Nokia Events)

Leading on from the announcement I was invited by WOMWorld/Nokia to attend a virtual Q&A session with Maija who is part of the Nokia Communications team for the N8, and Aapo who is the Director of Ecosystem Marketing – Nokia Qt SDK launch and Essa.

Below is a summary of that session:( full transcript on the Nokia Nseries blog)

Q: Mickyfin:is there any more specific release dates that are country specific, and Will all five colours shown be available on release?

A: Nokia Maija:Hey Mickyfin, there will be three colors in the beginning, the silver white, dark grey and green. Info on the release date is third quarter.

Q: mack005: And how about the battery is it built-in?

A: Nokia Maija: About the battery, we wanted to create a robust, one-piece device that feels good in the hand, therefore the integrated battery that can not be replaced by the user.

Q: FoneArena: Did Nokia achieve better battery life due to integrated battery ?

A: Nokia Esa: Integrated battery does not actually affect to battery life.

Q: Stobbsc: My first question if I may is What processor does the N8 have and will it have a GPU core?

A: Nokia Maija: about the processor: we do actually have a graphics accelerator next to a main processor. Its a way to get a great perf

Q: mack005: is it a ARM-11 680MHz processor?

A: Nokia Esa: @mack005 yep, that’s the processor, plus we got the grapchics accelerator next to it. Getting great speeds with that combination. Some screens are running already now at 60fps

Q: Sergejs: Greetings! Does the N8 have a camera cover or not? It’s hard to tell from the official images…

A: Nokia Maija: @sergejs: there is no camera cover. The materials are highly scratch resistant, and also, we wanted to make the use of many social applications as seamless as possible

Q: FoneArena:Can you say how is the N8 Camera better than the N82 ?

A: Nokia Esa: @FoneArena: yep, camera is stunning. It starts from the sensor, bigger the sensor, brighter shots I checked few 300-400€ pocket cameras and they had smaller sensors

A: Nokia Esa: And we piled the cam with 28mm wide optics from zeiss, that’s great combination

Q: FoneArena: Esa , Is Nokia entering Pocket Cam business then

A: Nokia Esa: we’ve been in cam buziness for a while. it’s in Nseries

Q: Mickyfin: Will the N8 FW updates still be tied to product codes leading to great frustration among large groups of users or will S^3 now allow updates to be applied regardless of product code, along the lines of Maemo for the N900 ?

A: Nokia Esa: @Mickyfin I need to check the product code thing. Don’t know at this point

Q: zeem35: What is the actual available user memory in the ROM?

A: Nokia Maija: @zeem35, the device user memory is 145MB and the Nokia N8 has 256MB RAM, improved with dynamic data management, which means great user experience

Q: zeem35: Why is the Homescreen limited to 3?

A: Nokia Aapo:@zeen35 – concious design decision. two reasons – to have the best possible performance for the home screen. second, to keep it simple enough to use.

Q: Mickyfin: Can you expand on the USB To Go; what is it, will an adapter be required to use standard USB memory sticks, do you get read/write compatibility with USB memory sticks, and what formats & filesize are supported (e.g. NTFS, HFS? in addition to FATx). Can a 5Gb HD movie be copied into the phone from a memory stick, for example?

A: Nokia Esa: USB OTG: We’ll have an adapter inbox to connect your USB memory sticks & hard drives. There’s obviously a power limitation that N8 can supply so some of the bigger hard drives need an external power supply

A: Nokia Esa: You can copy big files from hard drives without PC. There is one limitation with the filesizes; max is 4GB, it comes from FAT32 system.

Q: Guest: Hi, i’d like to know where the usb port is

A: Nokia Esa: USB is in the left side

Q: Mickyfin: Will S^3 support virtual RAM, will SIP be enabled, and which qt version does it come with?

A: Nokia Aapo: @Mickyfin Qt 4.6

Q: Rafe: Some Qt SDK questions for Aapo:

How integrated is the SDK going to get. I appreciate it has the ‘new’ Qt simulator and on-device debugging, but what about integration with (Symbian) Signing and upload to Ovi Store?

Any risk of fragmentation between the main Qt SDK and the Nokia Qt SDK (or is it really a question of tighter focus on Nokia specific elements (simulator, mobility APIs etc).

Is Qt going to be upgraded separately to the platform i.e. Qt 4.7 release will be getting near final by the end of the summer. Thinking of potential of Qt Quick etc.

What about support for Qt SDK on other platforms. I see Mac is a possible, any time line on that? What about Linux?

A: Nokia Aapo: when Nokia N8 ships, we will have Ovi Store publishing in place for Nokia Qt SDK apps

A: Nokia Aapo: @Rafe we are very keen not to fragment

A: Nokia Aapo: @Rafe Windows and Linux are out first but we are very hard at work with Mac version as well. So we are actively working to get it out. That means Nokia development on all computer platforms!

Q: irfun4ever: N8 coming with Flash 4. is it mean we can be able to watch facebook videos?

A: Nokia Esa: Flash Lite 4 comes with compatibility to Flash 10 video

Q: SymbianTweet: Dose N8 record sound in 5.1 channel.

A: Nokia Maija: @SymbianTweet, there is stereo sound recording for the video cam, 5.1 Dolby Digital Plus only in playback

Q: Stobbsc: Does the HDMI out just mirror the phone’s screen, at higher resolution, or can applications display content separately to both screens?

With more “connected” tvs and media centres etc, will it support easy wifi media sharing, Upnp, bonjour for service discovery etc?

With the HDMI out, is HDCP supported? I.e. will we be able to play back DRM’d HD Content?

what was the reasoning behind sticking with nHD rather than the higher res of the n900?

A: Nokia Esa: @Stobbsc: HDMI, video player & photos come out with 720p, rest of the UI is upscaled from nHD. E.g. Media wall UI looks cool on TV.

Q: Guest: Does qt quick offer a common way to develop for symbian and meego? Or the toolkit UI widgets will be different?

A: Nokia Aapo: @Guest yes a common way to develop UIs on both platforms. you can do UIs which are also forward compatible with future Symbian and Maemo UIs. Furthermore, there are projects to add mobile specific UI components to the general pool

Q: zeem35: my friend had a bad experience with N97 border peeling off..

A: Nokia Esa: @zeem The covers are made out of aluminium and the colors come with anodization process. It seems to resist the scratches by nature. I bet nothing is 100%

A: Nokia Esa: you’ll gona love the new aluminium when get hold on the device

Q: Ani: @ ESA – whts your favourite thing about N8?

A: Nokia Esa: I love the camera, & HD. it’s wonderful

So what do I think of the device? To be honest I would like to hold my judgement and or praises until I manage to get my hands on public release version. However from looking at the spec and all the online chatter here are a few of my likes and concerns:

What I like so far:

• I like the form factor and colour options.
• I love the camera spec, xenon xenon xenon
• At last a multi-touch capacitive screen
• I think the price range is good at 360euro provided the device is released on time.
• Dolby digital Surround sound

Concerns so far:

• The Battery is a concern,  this device is aimed at taking many pictures especially with a xenon flash
• No camera lens cover (however many other devices have managed without it)
• I’m a fan of OLED’s, but it struggles in sunlight and this phone is made for being outdoors taking images.