The Nokia N8 achieved a lot of “firsts”. It was the first device on the market with support for all 5 3G bands, meaning you could use it anywhere in the world and still get high speed mobile broadband. It even does T-Mobile’s funky 1700 MHz band. It was also the first, and remains the only, 12 megapixel camera to come out of Nokia. Said camera also does 720p video capture, which is something many devices on the market today also do, but with no where near the same amount of quality. The N8 was also the first device to ship with Symbian^3, Nokia’s latest version of their ancient operating system that still holds the crown as the most popular smartphone platform, but is dangerously close to losing it thanks to the glut of Android devices that are coming out seemingly every week.
Forget about Symbian for a second. And I know for many of you that’s a difficult proposition since the onscreen keyboard isn’t accurate, the browser is slow, and the number of applications worth downloading from the Ovi Store can be counted on your fingers and toes. The one thing that continues to stun nearly everyone who has had a chance to review the device is the camera. It’s simply the best camera phone out there, bar none, but for one developer it wasn’t good enough. CameraPro is an application that’s been released for people who want to squeeze every last drop of performance out of their handset. It’s been reviewed by All About Symbian and they say the ability to select your ISO setting, lower the JPG compression rate thus enabling better quality (and larger file sizes) images, take video in continuous autofocus mode, and to up the digital zoom from the default 2x to 11x, have made it a must have download. They warn that it’s a bit buggy, but that it seems to be getting better on a weekly basis.