Updated 26 May, 2012, 4:18 pm IST

Nokia's 12MP N8 Camera Phone Now Official

28 Apr, 2010, 8:24 am IST | by Shayne Rana |

The Nokia N8, the company’s very first 12MP camera phone is now official. With the Nokia N8, people can create compelling content, connect to their favorite social networks and enjoy on-demand Web TV programs and Ovi Store apps.

The Nokia N8 introduces a 12 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, Xenon flash and a large sensor. Additionally, the Nokia N8 offers the ability to make HD-quality videos and edit them with a built-in editing suite. Doubling as a portable entertainment center, people can enjoy HD-quality video with Dolby Digital Plus surround sound by plugging into their home theater system. The Nokia N8 enables access to Web TV services that deliver programs, news and entertainment from channels like CNN, E! Entertainment, Paramount and National Geographic. Additional local Web TV content is also available from the Ovi Store.

Social networking is also a main focus for the Nokia N8. People can update their status, share location and photos, and view live feeds from Facebook and Twitter in a single app directly on the home screen. Calendar events from social networks can also be transferred to the device calendar. The Nokia N8 comes with free global Ovi Maps walk and drive navigation, guiding people to places and points of interest in more than 70 countries worldwide.

Powering the Nokia N8 is Symbian ^3, the latest edition of the smartphone software, which introduces several major advances, including support for gestures such as multi touch, flick scrolling and pinch-zoom. The Nokia N8 also offers multiple, personalizable homescreens which can be loaded with apps and widgets. The new 2D and 3D graphics architecture in the platform takes full advantage of the Nokia N8's hardware acceleration to try and deliver a faster and more responsive user interface.� Symbian^3 also is also designed to deliver greater memory management allowing more applications to run in parallel for a faster multi-tasking experience.

The Nokia N8 is Nokia's first device to be integrated with Qt, a software development environment that simplifies the development and makes it possible to build applications once and deploy across Symbian and other software platforms. Nokia has also made the powerful and simple to use Nokia Qt SDK available, in its initial beta, to enable developers to start realizing the potential of Qt.

The N8 will be available in select markets during the third quarter of 2010, the estimated retail price of the Nokia N8 is EUR 370 which literally translates to just Rs. 21,676, before applicable taxes or subsidies. However we don’t expect the price to be that low so we’ll just have to wait and see what the Indian price tag will be.

Here’s another quick look at the features -

3.5-inch AMOLED, scratch resistant capacitive touchscreen sporting 360 x 640 pixels, multi-touch
3G with HDSPA speed up to 10.2Mbps, EDGE/GPRS
Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP, USB 2.0 (micro)
GPS with A-GPS support, free Ovi Maps preloaded
12MP camera, Xenon flash and LED for video, face/smile detection
FM radio
TV Out via 3.5mm handsfree
Dolby Digital Plus via HDMI Out
16GB internal memory plus microSD card support

Tags: Nokia , 12 Megapixel , Touchscreen , Symbian ^3 , N-Series

The X PRIZE Foundation and Nokia today announced the launch of the Nokia Sensing X Challenge, a $2.25 million global competition to stimulate the development of a new generation of health sensors