Nokia N8 event in Dubai next week

Nokia has just sent out an invitation for a launch event for Nokia N8 next Wednesday in Dubai. Could the N8 be the saviour of Nokia? Looking at the specifications it sure looks very interesting.
The Finnish company has struggled to keep up with competitors in recent years, most notably Apple with iPhone and RIM with Blackberry. It would seem they need something really exciting and successful in the segment of higher-end smartphones and perhaps they’re hoping N8 is it.

No doubt it looks very interesting if you go on the specs. Nokia has managed to pack a lot into a sleek anodized aluminum case that comes in several colors, including silver white, dark gray, orange, blue and green. Central to the N8 is a 3.5-inch 16:9 capacitive touch screen (640 x 360 pixels) showing 16.7 million colors.

There’s 16GB of internal memory, expandable with an additional 32GB using MicroSD card.

Clearly Nokia is hoping that some impressive camera numbers are going to attract buyers. With a 12-megapixel sensor and Carl Zeiss optics, the N8 certainly has enough hardware to impress. Whether the photo quality is there as well remains to be seen. HD video recording at 720p, 25 fps with H.264, MPEG-4 should mean high quality video as well. There’s also a HDMI connection so you can watch photos and video on a compatible TV.

One thing that’ll be interesting to try out on the N8 is the latest version of the Symbian mobile operating system. Symbian^3 (why they have the “^” there I’m not sure) brings a number of new functionality to the platform, many of them critical for Symbian to keep pace with the competition. Nokia says there are 250 new features in Symbian^3 including real multitasking, multiple personalized home screens, turbo charged graphics, multi touch and intelligent networking.

Tablets get snappier with Nvidia’s quad-core Tegra 3