3 weeks with the Nokia 808 PureView

It’s been almost three weeks since I first unboxed my brand new red Nokia 808 PureView, and I have really grown to love this unique device. It has surprised me in some ways; I was not really expecting to be able to use it as my daily phone, mainly because my Nokia N9 has taken the #1 spot for the past year, and its Swipe UI is very hard to beat.

The Nokia 808 PureView runs Symbian Belle FP2, which has been totally slated in most of the phone’s reviews, and while I am aware that these reviews were written by iPhone and/or Android users (let’s face it, the desk of those reviewers had an iPhone 5 or an SGS III sitting next to the keyboard!), I too was a little wary.

My experience with Symbian in its latest S^3 form dates back to the N8, which I purchased as soon as it was available on Amazon in the US. Since then, I’ve bought (and sold, and then re-bought!) the E7, E6 and C7. I wouldn’t have purchased these phones if I hated Symbian, so I do like it. But buying such an expensive unit as the 808… well, I was excited by the camera, but not that excited about diving back into Symbian again to be honest. It’s been a full two years since I first had the N8, and even though I still have it, the OS is sluggish by today’s standards, the system chugs along ok, but it’s no N9, no SGS III, no iPhone.

But…

The more positive reviewers, trusted guys such as Steve Litchfield and Stephen Quin, were saying that with the better internal hardware, and the right tweaks to Belle in FP2, it was lightyears away from S^3 in its first release.

So I had faith. Faith in those who had actually used the 808 for a decent amount of time, and who had really put it through its paces, and my trust in those people who were saying, “Go for it!” paid off.

Yes, the Nokia 808 PureView is a dream of a phone, and to me, I find it hard every day to decide whether it’s the N9 or the 808 for my daily usage. I’m changing my sim card a few times every few days, but to be honest, it has been sat inside my 808 for the majority of the time since it arrived.

While I have come across some oddities, it has been very smooth sailing. There have been some random (but now explainable) reboots, some apps don’t like each other and squabble (namely Font Zoomer and Opera browsers, which is a shame) and the battery life seems to be awesome until I get down to around 20% and then it dives to 3% in just a couple of hours, even though it took all day from 6am to 6pm to go from 100% to 20%, so that battery metering might be a bit wonky. Probably is on all phones though I bet.

But the camera is the one feature that makes me proud to carry this thing around in my pocket ecvery day. It doesn’t matter anymore if I think something is worth taking a photo of or not. With 16GB of onboard storage and a further 16GB microSD card, I feel like taking photos of everything I see! And the best thing is, I just know the photos will come out really, really well. I’ve been out and about, taking some snaps, uploading them to Twitter and Facebook, and it’s all been very easy to do. Big thanks to Nokia for recently pushing out a further update to the Gallery, so now sharing to Twitter is easy peasy and you don’t have to do it via the Twitter app of your choice (I use Tweetian).

So, I will let you know how it goes as the weeks fly by. I will continue to enjoy uploading my shots to Twitter and Flickr, and I hope you enjoy my ride with me. I used to feel like a stowaway as I trawled through PureViewClub.com pages, reading all the articles, following the 808 users on Twitter, and all the while feeling like I was missing out on something truly amazing.

And I now think that the Nokia 808 is truly amazing. The photos say it all.

Feel free to see these pics and more at Flickr

http://www.flickr.com/photos/andyhagon/sets/72157632802524292/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/andyhagon/sets/72157632729782422/

Cheers! 🙂