Calling who you need to call and quickly – N8 does it Bumper free! ;)

Calling and Contacts 

In with the New

And out with the old

In the last year much more emphasis has been put on the signal strength and call quality of new phones and lets be honest it all started with Antennagate .For those who don't know what that is its the issue Apple had with the Iphone 4 when it was launched and dropped more calls than a baby with butter fingers! With that said .. rest assured There is no Antenna gate here. From day one I've always had great 3G and 3.5G signal in the N8 using Vodacom. The data connection have also been quick and rarely hang. But onto the calling! The N8 uses a Noise cancelling Mic so that the person on the other end can hear you clearly and has a Great speaker too. During my longest call with the N8 ( one hour long ) I didn't expect to notice a difference coming from the N97 but it was too much to ignore! I Found the speaker nice and clear so that I didn't have to turn up the volume and the conversation ( Nokia – "Connecting people" hehe ). I also didn't have any sort of distortion to deal with. There isn't much I can say about a call but from my experience the N8 has great call quality and is an improvement on the N97.

The other piece that affects your calling is the Loud speaker. When I first saw the position of the loud speaker I thought it may be a problem . The speaker is next to the camera at the back of the phone so my thoughts were that it was going to be muffled and in some ways I was right. The speaker works great in all your usual circumstances like playing music or using the loud speaker option as long as the phone isn't on some thick fabric , the fabric just sucks up the sound and even at top volume the N8 can then sound pretty much dead! I don't think it's a huge issue and I only really experienced it when I did it on purpose to test. The use of the loud speaker is also good compared to my N96 which had a pretty much useless loudspeaker. I think the N8 has a great all round loudspeaker my only ask is why not go two speakers like the N97 and 5800xm? I actually prefer that set-up!



That's all for calling and quality of the calling so next up is how easy is it to make a call? Nokia brought in a new Dialler and call setup for the N8 and it works. The Number of touches to make a call has reduced alot and it's really noticeable! So.. one touch to bring up the dialler then what? You can either dial, enter contacts .enter the call log OR and this is the best ..type the persons name and watch as they appear , touch and there it dials! This system was used in some none touch Nokia phones like the E75 and also available for other phones from a app called SkyeQuik Key the only difference being Skye allowed you to launch apps by typing their name too like I did on my N95 amd N96 The Dialler is only available in portrait mode.

Nokia have also revamped the Contacts card so that it's easier to make a call sms or video call and most importantly link to the Social App. All your usual call settings like divert , forwarding etc are still there.



That ends the main part of the review..The Next section focus's more on individual apps on the N8 both from Nokia and 3^rd Party..They are pretty much a list of apps that I Use. Love and Cant do with out!