Foreword, box

Nokia made a great business with its luxury phones: they are pumping out members of the 8xxx series, which are highly popular amongst users. Nowadays I can hardly travel on the subway without seeing someone with an iPhone or a Sirocco in his hand. Of course the two handsets are not nearly the same category, but this shows one thing for sure: in Hungary a surprisingly high number of people have money for a phone with a price over 600 Euros. Interesting.

And why is a luxury phone a luxury phone? Firstly because, like all other luxury items, its price. For such a gadget we have to pay at least 600-800 Euros, which is, in my opinion, unduly much for a mobile phone, but this is the essence of luxury items. Secondly because it is "exclusive", that is – quoting the Vocabulary of foreign words and expressions – distinguished, elegant, sole, tasteful – this is expression, however, can applied to a multitude of devices. Thirdly it is assembled of quality materials, but the definition isn’t perfect here either, as in my opinion the Arte isn’t any better or more beautiful than for example the 6500 Classic, but I will detail this later on. Let’s say that that the luxury phone is a luxury phone because it is disgustingly expensive.

The test device got to me thanks to XXL GSM. We can observe on the box, that it is not everyday stuff, and accordingly the list of accessories isn’t the usual either. Besides the phone itself we find a superb quality leather case, a Bluetooth headset, and a nifty little cradle, but of course the standard accessories are here too (charger, data cable, manual, CD).

Circling the phone

The Arte is the third 8800 phone: first there was the standard edition, then in fall 2006 came the Sirocco, and now we have the latest gadget. This is the first of this type of phones to reach me, so I took care of it as if my life was depending on it. Upon receipt I thought that everyone will be gazing at it, but it didn’t happen that way at all: the men in the street probably didn’t know what it is and how much does it cost. I have survived this somehow.

There are two editions, the Arte and the Sapphire; I had the possibility of testing the former. This consists of stainless steel and glass the other model has leather too. I can not have a word against the use of materials, the feel quality is supreme. But it’s heavy. Very heavy. 150 grams, but it somehow seems a lot more, probably because of the phone’s size (109 x 45.6 x 14.6 mm). To tell the truth I had the thought that in the factory they put small weights in it on purpose, this way increasing the "it’s made of metal" feeling, it is much more probable, however, that it really has this many stuff in it. It pulls down the shirt’s pocket anyway.

We have two colors, black and silver, the latter is much rarer, this is the color of the strip on the side of the device, and the band on the bottom of the front cover. On top of the front cover there is a very discrete Nokia logo looking around, above that we find the speaker, on right of this is the miniature secondary camera, which can be used of course during video-calls. The display’s diagonal is 2 inches, uses OLED technology; everybody is saying that this is the future, and no wonder: it has an astonishing picture, it has a very low consumption, the readability is great, although the luminosity is not as good as in case of the TFT panels, but that shouldn’t be a huge problem. The resolution is 240 x 320 pixels, as it should be. The part above the display is very resistant to scratches – according to the manufacturer -; I haven’t tested this for obvious reasons, but it looks really heavy-duty, it’s something like the iPhone’s display.

Underneath the display we find the main controls, namely the five-way d-pad, the buttons for accepting/rejecting a call and the two function buttons. When in stand-by it doesn’t show that these are buttons, only when the backlight is turned on. There are easily usable, look nice, but interestingly on the bottom we can see some light "escaping" the phone, which shows some fitting defects. And that’s a shame in case of such a device.

There are two of the previously mentioned metal stripes, these separate the navigational tools from the lower glass area, and they split up nicely after sliding so the numerical buttons appear. The model I had for testing was probably from Asia, as there were some stripe-signs above the keys, which were unknown for me. Sliding the phone by the way – just like at other models from the series – is a bit different than in case of a regular phone, as we are not sliding the glass part down, but he other part up. I personally like it much better that the navigational keys are visible without sliding too, not mentioning the fact that the phone became much more usable this way.

On top of the phone there is only the power button, on the left side we can observe one of the buttons necessary for taking off the metal back of the phone.

The microUSB connector found its place on the bottom, on the right side – over the other button for taking off the back – we find the loudspeaker.

The back of the phone is very tasteful, just as all other parts. On top of the detachable part there is another metallic part shining, other areas are completely black. On top there is a quite small size lens peeking back at the observer, no megapixels or anything else labeled, although we are facing a 3.2 megapixel autofocus camera. Midway we find the inevitable Nokia logo, there is nothing else over here.

The soft part

Our little novelty gadget is based on Nokia’s well-tried Series40 platform. Basically there are no problems with speed, although it’s a fact that this is not the fastest system on the market. We meet the most serious thing in the main menu already, as this is black and white. Independently of the theme selected, at least regarding the icons, the background at one is made up of a few ivy-colored stripes, which is "dynamically" changing, sometimes – no one knows why, but – the twisting lines have a different position. Consistency wasn’t top priority for the designers, that’s for sure, as in the b&w menu we can sometimes find a colored icon, which makes quite a crappy look.

After getting used to the bit retro-like menu, we can start looking around in it. PIM functions are complete again, alarm clock, calendar, to-do list, notes, calculator, countdown timer, stopwatch, voice recorder, these can all be found in some point of the menu with a grid layout. Under Applications we can find the following programs: Converter, Downloads, Opera Mini, Search, Widsets, Size Converter, World Clock, three of these have a colored icon. There are two games on the machine, Golf Tour and Highroller Casino.

In the calendar we can choose between day, week and month view, it can be used very easily. From the 1 GB internal memory we can use 924 MB for storing multimedia content, there are 14 MB reserved for PIM entries (that is for calendar notes, SMS messages, etc.) which is more than satisfying.

Let’s phone and data-communicate

There is room for 1000 names in the phone book. We have the usual offer from extra fields, besides first name, last name and phone number we can store e-mail address, web address, company name, occupation, official and nickname, postal address, user name, birth date and we can also attach photo, sound and video to all these information. As I have already mentioned the PIM memory is the limit for short text messages, as is for the maximum 300 KB size in case of multimedia messages. There is an e-mail client; it can handle authenticated IMAP servers too. The web browser can also be familiar from older Series40 models; basically it can be used well.

The Arte has nothing to be ashamed of in means of data transfer/communication. Although it does not know HSDPA, but it does have 3G support. If lacking coverage we can also surf the net though EDGE or GPRS, since the handset supports these standards too. Unfortunately there is no WiFi, but the Bluetooth 2.0 supports A2DP and the infrared port is also missing from the repertoire. The USB port is microUSB known from the Luna, supposedly this is the future, it didn’t annoy me that I can’t plug my own usual miniUSB cable into the phone, which, by the way, also functions in USB Mass Storage mode.

There were serious problems with the phone when I was making phone calls. I am almost sure that I was facing a unique problem, but it’s really a shame, that I received a faulty phone from such an expensive model – in my opinion the guys over in Finland might be having problems with quality control. Sound quality is basically good, but in 75% of the cases there was a horrible buzzing sound, as if my talking partner was travelling on the underground, I could hardly understand him, and he didn’t hear me at all. There was no logic in the occurrences: sometimes I already heard the sound when dialing and sometimes it appeared only after a few minutes of talking. I managed to improve the situation by using only the GSM network and by turning on the sound clarity option – this way "only" every third-fourth call was disturbed by the problem of major importance.

Media, namely multi

The camera lacking any labels on the back of the phone has 3.2 megapixels and autofocus. The highest possible resolution in case of photos is 2048 x 1536 pixels, in case of movies this values is 640 x 480 pixels, the latter being stored by the machine in 3GP format; the full capacity if the internal memory lets us store a bit more than 1 hour of recording.

The settings are the usual. We can set exposure correction, turn on night mode, set the automatic shutter, enable image sequence, we have three effects, the white balance can be set manually, we can set the amount of jpeg-compression and the camera sounds can be turned off. Picture quality is not outstanding, but not poor either, let the pictures talk.

The music player brings nothing new either, but its range of services is theoretically complete, so it doesn’t need to. The only thing missing from its repertoire is the bass-boost function; in exchange we have a 5-band equalizer, where we can set up our own schemes. Songs can be fast-forwarded and rewound, the speed if these dynamically increases and depends on the length of the track played. There are repeat and shuffle modes, we can filter the songs by artist, album and genre, but we can also use playlists.

The music player, which also runs in the background, has two factory themes; I think it is obvious that the one on the first picture is the absolute winner. The sound quality is very good when using the loudspeaker, although it starts to hiss and crackle when the volume is on maximum, but it really has a superb quality when the volume meter is at 70-80 percent. As we don’t get a stereo earphone with it I can not say anything about that – although I think that for such a price they could have given one with the phone. Bluetooth headset or no, there is no FM radio.

It is not a specifically a multimedia feature, but there is something in the settings named "tap-for-time". It can be turned on or off and we can set the type of clock to appear (analog/digital). The essence of this feature is that with a locked keypad we have to tap on the phone anywhere below the OLED screen and then the clock appears for about two seconds. It looks a bit silly, but practically it is a quite useful thing.

Battery-buddy and the others

Back when Sirocco came out, the manufacturer packaged two batteries with it, thus compensating that they weren’t of high capacity. With the Arte we get a huge, 1000 mAh battery, so theoretically we won’t have any problems with the phone’s working time. Unfortunately due to the relatively short test period I cannot say anything particular about this, but I feel that the new luxury model will take it at least for 3 days which is a definite evolution compared to its predecessors.

So what can I say in conclusion about the 8800 Arte? It’s good stuff, very good, quality make, but for such an amount of money it is unspeakably expensive. Who can afford it and wants to buy it, those will buy it anyway, irrespectively of what I write here. It has its flaws but those aren’t big. It cannot be recommended for such a price, so it is just simply:

Nokia 8800 Arte

Bocha

Translated by Szaszati

Nokia 8800 Arte was provided by XXL GSM. The handset can be bought at:
Budapest VI. Jókai square 6.
Budapest VI. Teréz boulevard 18.
On-line at www.xxlgsm.hu.

Specifications

Nokia 8800 Arte
	General
	Technology	GSM, UMTS
	Size	109 x 45,6 x 14,6 mm
	Weight	150 grams
	Colors	Black
	Display
	Display diagonal	2 inches
	Screen resolution	240 x 320 pixels
	Display type	OLED
	Number of colors	16 million
	Memory
	Phonebook capacity	1000 entries
	SMS memory / max. MMS size	reserved from internal memory / 300 KB
	Internal memory	1 GB
	Memory expandability	-
	Data transfer
	Frequency bands	900/1800/1900 MHz
	GPRS / EDGE	Class 10 (4+1/3+2) / Class 10 (236,8 kbps)
	UMTS / HSDPA	present (384 kbps) / none
	IrDA / Bluetooth	none / 2.0 (A2DP is)
	WiFi	none
	USB	microUSB
	Push-to-talk / RSS	present / none
	GPS receiver	none
	Basic functions
	Profiles	present
	Vibra function	present
	Built-in handsfree	present
	Voice calling / voice commands	none / none
	Sound recorder	present
	Alarm clock	present, also when turned off
	Predictive text entry	Hungarian T9
	Software
	Platform	Nokia Series40
	WAP / HTML browser	2.0 / present
	E-mail client	present (POP3, IMAP4, authenticated)
	Java	present, MIDP 2.0
	Games	2
	Currency converter	present
	Extra software	-
	Multimedia
	Main camera	3,2 megapixels, autofocus
	Secondary camera	present
	Video recording	present (max. 640 x 480 pixels)
	Music player	present, running also in background
	Equalizer	present, can create own schemes
	FM-radio	none
	Working times
	Main battery	1000 mAh Li-Ion
	Stand-by time	300 hours
	Talk time	3 hours
	Other
	Opera Mini