The Nokia N8 is Nokia's most exciting handset since the introduction of the Communicator range. Moving away from Nokia's boring mid-range portfolio, the N8 definitely brings a new lease of life to the Finnish manufacturer.
The first thing you'll notice is that the S60 operating system has been scrapped in favour of Nokia's newest platform, Symbian^3. It's an evolution of S60, but brings in elements of the Maemo UI so it is much more usable. We found it to be pretty stable, especially considering our N8 is a pre-production sample. Symbian^3 is very similar to other touchscreen operating systems. There are three homescreens and each can hold up to 24 widgets, bookmarks and shortcuts.
Apps are downloaded from Nokia's Ovi Store, but it still needs a lot of work - the selection available is limited in comparison to Android, but this isn't surprising considering Android has been around for a couple of years and the N8 is the first Symbian^3 device. Apps developed for S60 5th Edition should be compatible with Symbian^3.
