Live from New York, It's Nokia's 8800!

Nokia 8800 Gallery (MobileBurn)

While it is for certain a beautiful phone, I'm not sure it is quite the phone it should be. For one, the spring-assisted open/close mechanism is a bit too beefy. The slider portion of the handset literally slams into position, as opposed to the smooth, slowed motion found in the Nokia 8910 and 8910i. The finish is also a bit of an issue for me. The stainless steel is quite attractive, but the polished areas are good fingerprint collectors - using the brushed finish all around would have dealt with that. On top of that, the stainless steel body is pretty heavy. I appreciate that the phone feels rock solid, and looks fantastic, but at the end of the day, it is going to be held by potentially oily hands and carried around in pockets and purses.

I'm also confused about the camera choice. Having only a resolution of 800x600, it just seems as if Nokia couldn't decide as to whether or not they really wanted a camera in the phone. Considering that most of the newer high-end phones are coming with megapixel cameras (Nokia's included), it just seems odd to make such a small jump in resolution from VGA to SVGA. I just don't get it.

Aside from those points, it is a very cool handset. Great looking, distinctive, and fairly feature packed. There's even support for Nokia's new Bluetooth stereo headset. The 262k TFT display has a high resolution of 208x208 pixels, and it looks fantastic. The email client supports SMTP, IMAP, and POP. The sound system supports 64 voices, and there is a built-in FM radio. A memory card slot that could augment the 8800's 64MB of internal storage would have been great, though, since the 8800 can play stereo MP3 and AAC files.