Nokia 8800 Sapphire Arte Reviews

Building on the original Nokia 8800, the Arte clearly pitches itself as a luxury handset. Satisfyingly solid and heavy, the Arte is a sleek blend of smoked glass and black metal with an elegant chrome trim – not particularly flashy, but it certainly looks expensive. Not the most compact of phones, the Arte is a solid 109mm x 45.6mm x 14.6mm. Weighing 150g the handset is heavy in your hand, but you do at least feel that you’re holding something that will last. Below the relatively small screen on the front panel are two soft keys and a simple joypad. Slide the panel up to access the simple keypad with bevelled keys for ease of typing.

Better equipped than previous handsets in Nokia’s luxury range, the 8800 Arte still fails to provide many of the features we might expect from a premium phone. For example, the 3.2 megapixel camera can record videos and comes with 8x digital zoom for taking close-ups, auto focus and a Photo editor. However with no flash, images taken in poor light turn out blurry. Mind you, those taken in better light conditions are good enough to take small prints from. The 8800 Arte supports video streaming and video playback in 3GPP, H263 & H264 formats.

The integrated music player supports AAC and MP3 file formats and produces a clear sound through the proprietary headset supplied with the phone. Unfortunately there is no 3.5mm headphone jack with which to plug in your own speakers. The 8800 Arte supports video ringtones meaning you can view accompanying videos on your handset at the same time as the ringtone is playing, although you might prefer to pick up the phone! 64 voice polyphonic ringtones and MIDI ringtones are also supported.

3G data speeds make browsing the internet a pleasure via the phone’s XHTML web browser. The Arte also supports EDGE and Bluetooth 2.0 for connecting your phone to other Bluetooth compatible devices and transferring data wirelessly. The phone can also be connected to other devices with a USB cable using the micro USB port. The battery provides up to three hours talk-time and approximately 300 hours of standby battery time.

Text messages, audio messages, instant messages, multimedia messages and email are all supported. A mobile email service enables you to send and receive emails including attachments, just as you would on your PC. Certain features of the phone can be accessed in flight mode, which is designed for places such as aeroplanes and hospitals where mobile phone use is restricted.

1GB of internal memory is pretty generous, but unfortunately there is no card slot, so that’s all the space you’re going to get. There are some cool gimmicks, such as turning the phone face down to mute a call, or using single buttons to perform two functions. We particularly like the elegant clock face that appears when you tap the phone.

The Nokia 8800 Arte is certainly something of a looker but in spite of its hefty price tag falls short in some important areas.