Nokia N8 Teardown Shows Tough Phone, Great Camera
Nokia has wowed us with its hot N8 smartphone, the flagship cellphone which packs in every function known to man, and controls them all with a horrible, old fashioned Symbian OS. Meanwhile, Nokia’s soon-to-be-leaving mobile boss Anssi Vanjoki said using Android was like “peeing in your pants for warmth” in winter, and Ari Jaaksi, head of Nokia’s Meego OS, quit this week.
It seems that the only thing Nokia is still good at is hardware. Luckily, iFixit has gotten hold of an N8 and – of course – taken the ting apart. Follow along to see just how Nokia manahged to fit so much in there.
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The N8 is similar in size to the iPhone, but fatter. This is mostly because of the huge camera module inside, which sports a 12MP sensor and a five-element Carl Zeiss lens. This extra thickness does allow some wiggle-room, and might explain how the Finnish technicians managed to include a USB-port and HDMI-port along wioth all the hardware buttons around the edge. And of course, there’s that slide-out keyboard.
Showing just how serious the camera is, the N8 uses a proper Xenon lamp for the “flash”. Take a look: it’s not just an LED but a tube, just like you have in your compact digicam.
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IFixit CEO Kyle Wiens likes the N8, as it is so easy to repair. The battery isn’t soldered in, the glass panel isn’t fused to the AMOLED touch-screen and the handset itself is easy to take apert. How easy? “even a Finnish caveman could do it (provided they were evolved enough to handle a Torx screwdriver,” says Wiens.
The N8 looks like a solid phone (literally: “this is the beefiest phone we’ve taken apart all year,” says Kyle), but is still crippled by the Symbian OS. Still, if nothing else, it should take a nice picture.
