Nokia 808 PureView (Unlocked)

The Nokia 808 PureView ($699 list) is an engineering exercise and a collector's item. It's also a near-total failure as a modern smartphone. It packs an amazing 41-megapixel camera sensor, but thanks to an exceedingly long development time, the 808 PureView runs the archaic Symbian OS instead of Windows Phone like all current Nokia devices. Worse, some of the preloaded apps don't even work correctly. Nokia hasn't given an exact date for the 808 PureView's arrival in the U.S., and if you're wondering why you'd want this cell phone, you don't. It's way too expensive and is compromised for American consumers.

Design and Display
The 808 PureView?not to be confused with?the Kanye West album,?808s & Heartbreak, or the 808 kick drum you hear on Beastie Boys and Run D.M.C. records?is an odd beast. It's slightly bulky and misshapen, measuring 4.9 by 2.4 by 0.6 inches (HWD) and weighing a hefty six ounces. It's not actually 0.6 inches thick all the way through, though, as there's a very prominent bump around the camera lens. The PureView 808 is closer to half an inch thick otherwise, which is still more than most in this era of super-thin smartphones. But there's a 41-megapixel camera in there, so we'll give it a break.

As always, Nokia has a fine touch with hardware design. The 808 PureView feels very well made, with quality plastics, a Corning Gorilla Glass front panel, and button housings that seem laser-cut in their precision. The phone turns on and off almost instantly with the little Power button on the bottom right of the front panel. A slider switch handles unlocking the screen faster than any other phone I've tested recently. You get a top-mounted micro HDMI port and a dedicated Camera button as well. Nokia also packs in a microUSB charger, a data cable, a wired stereo headset, and a wrist strap in the box.

Gorilla glass aside, the 4-inch, 640-by-360-pixel capacitive AMOLED touch screen is old news. Fonts look pixelated, and you can't see much of desktop Web pages, but at least it's bright and colorful, with deep blacks. Touch response is uneven; during testing the phone lagged finger swipes by about half a second, which made navigation tricky. There's an accelerometer, but it constantly jumped around even when we were holding the handset perfectly level in landscape mode. Typing was incredibly frustrating as a result, although the keys are roomy enough. In portrait mode it was much tougher to type accurately. It seems like a software issue; there's no problem typing quickly on the iPhone and numerous Android phones with 3.5-inch screens in portrait mode; 4 inches should be plenty.

Connectivity and Voice Calls
The PureView 808 is a quad-band EDGE (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) and five-band HSPA+ 14.4 (850/900/1700/1900/2100 MHz) device with 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi. We had no problem connecting to a WPA2-encrypted network in our testing lab. The 808 is a true world phone, and one that can run at 14.4 speeds on both AT&T and T-Mobile here in the U.S., as well as overseas. Unfortunately, there's no 4G support of any kind, which is a tough con to swallow at $700. Since it's unlocked, you'll need to provide your own SIM card. This is the major reason why the PureView 808 costs so much, though many unlocked, high-end Android smartphones with dual-core processors and much better screens cost $500 or less.

Voice calls sounded good when they worked. Unfortunately, that wasn't often. Even with five solid AT&T signal bars in the middle of Manhattan, most dial attempts ended in "Connection Error" dialogs. Then, mysteriously, a third or fourth try would go through, and the call would stay connected. Voice quality in the earpiece sounded fine, and mostly midrange, but with plenty of gain. Transmissions through the microphone were exceptionally full and clear, almost like a corded phone. Noise cancellation is also good; we heard very little street noise through the earpiece in a voicemail test, and there was certainly plenty going on at the time.

Calls through a?Jawbone Era?Bluetooth headset ($129, 4.5 stars)?sounded clear. Voice dialing over Bluetooth was hopeless, though; we couldn't get the 808 PureView to recognize any of our commands. The speakerphone sounded well balanced, but too low for use outdoors even at maximum volume. Nokia rates the phone at 11 hours of talk time in 2G mode and 6.5 hours in 3G; we're still running battery tests and will update this review as soon as we have results.

OS, Apps, and Multimedia
Underneath the hood, there's a 1.3GHz ARM 11 single-core processor, 512MB RAM, and 16GB of onboard storage that you can expand to 48GB by installing up to a 32GB microSD card underneath the battery. My 32GB SanDisk card worked fine, although pulling the battery to swap cards is never fun.

Unfortunately, the phone runs Symbian, which dates back an entire decade. Nokia has abandoned the OS in favor of Windows Phone. The 808 PureView has Symbian because the company has been developing the phone for several years, and had started well before deciding to throw in with Microsoft. All things considered, Nokia has done a decent job of modernizing Symbian. At least superficially, it looks like an Android phone, with four customizable home screens you can swipe between. You tap icons to run programs, and you can install third-party apps, although there aren't that many, at least for us here in the U.S.

Alas, there is some good stuff in here: Quickoffice lets you open and edit Word and Excel files; Shazam hears music playing in the room and identifies it for you; Angry Birds and Asphalt 6 demos are colorful and play smoothly. Interestingly, the 808 PureView includes Nokia Rich Recording, which lets the phone record audio at up to 140dB, which is roughly the volume of a jet engine while you're standing 10 feet away from it. That's great for, say, recording concerts, but please don't try the jet engine thing at home.

Otherwise, it's just too difficult to get just about anything done unless you're already intimately familiar with Symbian?and very patient. Menus beget submenus, which beget dialog boxes, which beget error messages. The browser is a disaster; aside from the blocky, tiny fonts and stubborn screen response, the browser gets hung up on commonly used elements and can take a minute or more to deliver an HTML page.

Worse, many things don't even work at all. Nokia Music goes to a defunct Ovi Store, which then puts up a screen telling you a new store is on the way. The IM client is impossible to configure, as it asks for a CWA Server URL and a Network Connection type, and not, say, whether you use AIM or Google Talk. Nokia Recommends suggests a few random music albums, but then directs you to Nokia Music, which is down. Nokia Drive actually starts Nokia Maps, which does work and delivers voice-enabled, turn-by-turn GPS navigation, although it looks dated.

There's a standard-size 3.5mm headphone jack on top that works with the bundled wired earbuds as well as any aftermarket headphones you may want to use. Music tracks sounded clear and punchy through Plantronics BackBeat Go Bluetooth headphones ($99.99, 4 stars). The music player displays albums in a jukebox-style format you can swipe back and forth. For video, the 808 PureView had no problem playing back all of our test files, including DivX, Xvid, MP4, H.264, AVI, and WMV at resolutions up to 1080p, though obviously the low-resolution screen is a limiting factor in terms of sharpness.

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