What can you do with a Nokia N8?

 

Quite a bit, actually. TEDx Cape Town is happening tomorrow and since it was at this event that I won the Nokia N8, I thought I’ll give an overview of more than a year of owning this phone. I feel grateful to the organisers of TEDx Cape Town for the prize, but the device has received quite a bit of bad press since its release. So I’d like to highlight the three things I like most about it:

 

1. It has an FM transmitter

The N8 comes along on every road trip because of its built-in FM transmitter.  This means I can easily broadcast audio to my cassette-era car radio. Playing music might be the obvious choice, but listening to podcasts of This American Life and Planet Money is even better.

2. The camera is very good

Nokia made a deal with Carl Zeiss to have his high-end lenses built into the phones. The result is the best camera phone I’ve seen. That’s the second reason why the N8 comes along on all trips. I used the N8 to take the photos of Malawi and Nairobi on this blog. The resolution is huge, the image crisper and it fits in my pocket. Click on the thumbnail below for a comparison of the same view photographed with the N8, a Blackberry Bold 9780 and an iPad 2.

3. It suits outdoor exercise

The range of apps for the N8 are limited, but the ones I’ve used most are exercise apps like Endomondo and Tourality. It links easily via bluebooth to a Polar WearLink, making it possible to record your heart rate along with GPS data. The N8 transmits all the data from your run to the Endomondo website so that you can review it when you get home. Below is a graph of a run to the Waterfront I made this week.

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