Nokia N8 review

Belle was a huge jump forward in usability for the OS formerly known as Symbian. Now, older models that launched with the tired Symbian^3 and spent some time with Anna, as is the case with the Nokia N8, can finally join their newer brethren.

There's not much we haven't covered in our Belle review, but it's interesting to see how the latest version handles on the old hardware.

Perhaps we should begin with a few words about installing the update. It weighs in at around 300MB and you'll need to hook up your phone to a computer running Nokia Suite (3.3 or later) to install it. After that it's a straight forward process, you can watch this step by step video tutorial.

Anyway, here's the Nokia N8 running Belle.

Everything runs pretty smoothly - you can almost forget that you're working with a single 680MHz processor with 256MB RAM. Actually, if you compare this video with the one we shot for Symbian Anna (on the exact same N8 unit), you'll see how much better the browser handles - there's practically no visible redrawing when panning.

Nokia Belle brings refined browser UI

We tried running a few benchmarks and they both showed modest improvements. BrowserMark went from 21K to 25K, while Acid3 went 2 points over the 91/100 score that Anna gets on the N8.

The camera also got a performance boost in Belle, it can now shoot 720p videos at 30fps, however that's no news for the Nokia N8 as it had a special update just for it since Anna.

Video camera interface

The Belle phones will get several nice apps from Microsoft - OneNote and Lync. Details on that will be available soon.