Nokia N8 - initial views..

So the first thing i noticed when holding the N8 is its excellent build quality. Design quirks aside, the phone itself is a fine piece of crafted machinery. It feels solid in the hand and you'll either like or hate the pronounced camera bump.

alternate home screen..

The N8 is running Symbian 3, for someone familiar with Symbian the look and feel is pretty similar to the one you're used to from the N97 or even the 5800. You could easily find the list of improvements from the Symbian s60v5 if u Google for it.

Anyway, the first thing that you notice when u start up the phone is how closely integrated it is with Nokia's Ovi service offerings. If you sync your contacts on Ovi i guess it'll be easy for you to transfer your contacts into your new phone. I chose to sync the phone using Mail for Exchange. My primary contact list is on my PC and i have it synced to my iPad, my xperia x10 and my e72. Keeps everything sync in the clouds. Hehe as long as the office server is up and running, I’m sorted.

Setting up MFE is easy. It’s integrated in the whole email set up process. You just need to know the settings. In a few minutes I had my contacts, calendar and email synchronized. Symbian 3 has three customizable home screens which u can populate however which way u want. It’s not as customizable as an android home screen but it works how it is supposed to...

home screen

For business users, the phone comes with quickoffice and adobe pdf. The quickoffice version is just for viewing only and u need to upgrade enable the editing functions. If you’re coming from the E series phone, quickoffice comes free with your phones. That pretty much sorts your business needs.

business apps

Next up, we’ll take a look at the N8’s multimedia capabilities.

what's up with whatsapp..

by Mr Husband

so we pretty much can't live without our phones. and most of the time, we spent the bulk of our times sending text messages. sms, mms. yes while its easier to email or even phone call, sometimes u just want to send that quick text. and sometimes u'll find that u spend more on texts to ur contacts.

blackberry users have their bbm. for the rest of us the solution is whatsapp smartphone messenger.

whatsapp utilizes ur phones existing data plan to send text, and other multimedia messages to other whatsapp users in ur phone list. its currently available for the iphone, android and blackberry. and its currently running on beta for symbian phones.

u can buy it at the appstore for $0.99 for ur iphone and its available on a 90 day free trial for symbian and android phones. not sure about blackberries though and u can pay for a year's subscription for $1.99. i've downloaded the app for my e72 and and htc hero. thing is u can only have it running on one device at one time for one phone number. it basically uses ur phone number as the unique identifier or ur account. once u install it, it scans ur contact list for other whatsapp users and automatically puts them in a list.

then its just a question of messaging to your heart's content. if u have an unlimited data plan ur pretty much sorted. if u don't then u can save by using a wifi connection.

the other day, i had it installed on the senorita's e72 and she had a blast using it. couldn't put her phone down during the initial days as some friends who's already using whatsapp started texting her hehe. it was fun seeing her think whatsapp is providing her so much joy on her boring days.

are you on whatsapp?