Aug 25, 2008

Nokia 8800 Arte Luxury Phone review

Following on from Will’s post about the new Nokia 8800 Carbon Arte, I thought now would be a good time to sum up on my experiences to-date with the Nokia 8800 Black Arte (there is one other variant which is the Sapphire Arte, by the way).

I’ve now been using the device for about 2 weeks, and in that time have formed some opinions on it - headlines are below:

* Initial feelings on unboxing were actually a little bit flat - I’m not convinced the boxing has quite the luxury it should have, for what is currently Nokia’s most expensive model
* Peripherals are good, nay impressive - the headset is worth nearly £100 on it’s own, and the charger/stand is well-machined, and impressively weighty. Only disappointment was the case
* The device itself has a good design aesthetic - matching the look of a Mont Blanc Pen, and I would imagine, probably targeted at exactly the same market segment!
* The keyboard is potentially just a little too small for a man with large hands (!) - I struggle on text messages and menu-nav occasionally
* Battery is reasonable
* UI is quite minimalist, but then I like that - I’ve got a colour scheme up called “black”, which as you can probably guess, has very little on screen or visible
* Series40 in this device is reasonably quick - not lightning, but does what it does very competently
* PC Sync is really rather good indeed - contacts and calendar no problem - in fact, I daresay slightly better than Series60!

So overall, I am loving the first couple of weeks with the device - I got it as a voice + text device, hence my lack of headlines regarding the multimedia or other functions. There are all the usual suspects on board in that respect - including a 3.2MP camera, 1Gb of memory, and a media/music player, but I have been using this device with it’s minimalist intentions in mind.

I have some concerns about what will happen to it if it gets dropped (big scratches I should think), but I’ll right in another post about my attempts to handle this matter….. Source...

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