The Nokia 8800 Arte is a luxurious state of the art 3G phone which comes in a highly desirable casing. The 8800 Arte is a beautiful designed phone which is made for luxurious & high quality materials. The 3G handset is made from stainless steel & glass which comes with a super smooth slide opening mechanism. The casing is a sleek glossy black colour which adds to its distinctive design. The Nokia 8800 Arte is a high tactile handset that the user will never want to put down. The handset feels & looks quality when in the user hand. The overall size of the phone is 109mm by 45.6mm by 14.6mm which is a good size for carrying purposes. The 8800 Arte weighs 150 grams including the fitted battery. This super sleek phone comes with a beautiful high quality two Inch colour screen which displays up to sixteen million colours for the user to experience vivid colours on the screen. The 8800 Arte is a member of the Nokia 8000 series which includes other stylish slide opening mobile phones including the Nokia 8600 Luna, Nokia 8800, Nokia 8800 Sirocco & the Nokia 8800 Sapphire Arte but each phones has their own unique features & design.
Design
Design-wise, Nokia has made some subtle changes to the Sirocco series. In our opinion, the most significant improvement is the alphanumeric keypad. The buttons are now moderately bigger and the decent tactile feedback has increased the comfort level for texting. Instead of pecking on the keys, we can now type with reasonable ease. Our only gripe is the tight headroom above the top row of buttons. As a result, our thumbs kept hitting the border when texting.
Unlike the 8800 Siroccos, the control keypad is now accessible when the phone is closed. That's a good thing because we no longer need to slide open the handset to read an incoming text message, or pick up a call. Volume can also be adjusted using the navigation pad while the phone is closed.
It's not all roses. We found the navigation pad a tad too small and it's easy to end up hitting the central key when scrolling in any of the four directions. Things got a little more frustrating when we had to make a conscious effort to keep an eye on the left/right softkeys and call/end buttons, so we didn't end up calling someone while getting to the shortcut menu.
At 109 x 45.6 x 14.6mm, the Arte is the slimmest member of the 8800 family so far. And it's all good. The 150g heavyduty weight and metallic chassis also ensure that the premium dollar you'll be coughing up won't make you feel like you were suckered into some cheaper plastic model. That's if you can live with the fingerprint smudges and face oils.
There are two models in the Arte series--the 8800 Arte and the 8800 Sapphire Arte--and they both share the same design mould with a combination of metal and glass. The only differences, besides the color, are that the Sapphire edition uses a sapphire gem stone as the central button on the directional pad and parts of the handset are wrapped in coffee-brown soft leather.
If price isn't an issue, we prefer the Sapphire edition because the Arte is nearly a dead-ringer to the 8800 Sirocco. For current Sirocco owners especially, it doesn't make a lot of sense to invest another S$1,788 (US$1,176.32) for something that looks so similar.
Telephony
Just as we expected the signal reception and call quality are in line with the Nokia 8800 Arte high standing. Calls are loud and clear on both ends eliminating any possible obstacles to communication. However, many can consider the lack of video calls a real disappointment. It feels the 3G support is not used to the maximum. Not that video calling is something we cannot live without but it sure wouldn't hurt having it. A great new feature of Nokia 8800 Arte is the turn-to-mute functionality. It allows muting the phone during a call or hushing the alarm by simply flipping the device over. Here is a video that should give you an idea of exactly how it works.
User interface
If you expected Nokia 8800 Arte to bring some great surprises softwarewise, you will end up disappointed. It employs the Series 40 5th edition user interface with navigation and control almost the same as with the previous UI edition, used in the Nokia 8600 Luna. The Arte offers a large number of configurable options but at the cost of a little complicated menu structure and navigation.
When in stand-by, the display as usually visualizes the pre-selected wallpaper plus signal strength, battery status and time in the top bar. Beneath the top bar are the operator logo and the date. The bottom bar is reserved for the labels of the functions assigned to the center of the navigation key and the two context keys. The center of the navigation key opens the main menu, while the context keys can be assigned a function of your choice. The font on the main display can be of any color.
You can also turn active standby on if you want. It consists of several parts that can be edited or relocated according to the user's preferences. In the most common case, the top area is reserved for instant access to favorite functions indicated by their respective icons. The central area provides instant access to the music player. At the very bottom events from the calendar are displayed set for the current day. A cool feature here, that even Nokia smartphones do not have, is the possibility to add a note to the active stand-by. The two soft keys' functionality can also be altered if necessary.
The main menu in Nokia 8800 Arte can be visualized in four different ways: a grid of icons with or without captions, a list of items, and tabs. While each of them has its pros and cons our personal choice remains the typical grid view with legends. If you prefer more icons to appear simultaneously, you can go for the grid view without text, as it displays a 4 x 3 icons grid. The icons of the main menu can be freely reordered to suit the user's taste. An interesting thing to note here is that the Opera Mini browser, the calculator and the WidSets application can be found directly in the main menu. They are also featured in the applications folder so, basically, you can access them from wherever you prefer. Probably these three were considered important enough to place in the main menu for quicker access.
The submenus follow no consistent pattern. Some items have captions, others do not. In certain cases, you will even be able to see the selected item described in small font, so you will not need to step further into another menu level. As usual, the menu items are intuitively accessible through keypad shortcuts. The color background of the entire menu, as well as the wallpaper on the display, can be easily modified by applying one of the pre-installed themes. The menu responds quickly, without lagging or holdups. This is the case with basically any S40 device nowadays and we wouldn't expect any less from the Arte. Also, there were no halts or unexpected restarts for the time of our review.
Phonebook
The phonebook on Nokia 8800 Arte offers space for up to 1000 contacts and extensive configuration options. Each contact can be assigned a variety of fields but unluckily the phone numbers are limited to 5. Also, first names are separated from last names eliminating problems which may occur with synchronization.
Different ringtones can be assigned to each contact. Naturally, you can also assign personal pictures or videos that will run on an incoming call. The picture displayed is different for incoming and outgoing calls, as it fills the screen when you are on the receiving end of a call, and only take a small part of it when you are calling one of your contacts. There are three available view modes for your contacts: List-of-Names, Name-and-Number and Name-and-Picture. It can display the SIM card contacts, the phone memory contacts or both at the same time. The phonebook font size can also be enlarged to make reading you contacts easier.
Searching is done by gradual typing of the name of a contact. And that's not all: contacts can also be organized in groups and these can consequently be used as call filters. Another praiseworthy application is the voice dial, which requires no pre-recording of the commands and phonebook names. It is even equipped with a training application that helps for better results when using voice commands and/or dialing. The Call Log in Nokia 8800 Arte won't surprise anyone who has ever held a Series 40 device in their hands. It can display Dialed, Received and Missed calls separately, as well as all of them together. Every submenu can hold up to 20 call records with their date, time and duration.
Music player
The music player in Nokia 8800 Arte is identical to the one found in Nokia 7900 Prism. Looks have improved looks over the Nokia 6500 classic for example, but all remains unchanged featurewise. The music player sorts songs by artist, album and genre. The player works with MP3, MIDI, AAC, AAC+, and WMA formats. The supported A2DP profile allows listening on Bluetooth wireless earphones. The player looks can be changed to the classical skin if that suits the user better.
The handset uses the microUSB jack for connecting a headset, so finding a set of headphones for listening to music may just turn out very hard. Anyway you are not very likely to listen to tons of music on your Arte anyway. Besides you can always use the Bluetooth handsfree for that purpose. The sonic experience of the player is enhanced by an equalizer and a stereo expansion function. Nokia 8800 Arte has only one loudspeaker located on the side, right next to the camera. We did already mention that we weren't impressed by its performance at all.
Unfortunately, there is no FM radio on Nokia 8800 Arte, which the Luna for example used to have. So if you get bored with the music player all you can do is turn the video on. The video player is compatible with the 3GP and MP4 formats. Videos can be played in fullscreen mode, as well as fast-forwarded or rewound. The possibility to remove the soft key captions to make better use of the full screen view mode is nice and generally improves video watching.
Camera
Nokia 8800 Arte is equipped with a 3 megapixel camera with autofocus. It may not be the most impressive in terms of specifications, but is surely the best among the Nokia premium mobiles. Typical of Series 40, the camera settings are few, but that makes them simpler and easier to use. The settings include white balance, three photo quality options going form basic to high, and various effects. Sequence shots and shooting in both portrait and landscape mode are also among the available extras.
Unluckily, as mentioned, there is no flash on the device, which makes photos in low light conditions unusable. Even in good conditions the photo quality is not be on par with the best 3 megapixel cameraphones such as the Sony Ericsson K810. In general the detail is high, but the colors are oversaturated and the noise levels are high not only in the shadow areas, but in the well lit ones too. Just look at the skies from the samples below and you will get the idea. There are two letdowns about the camera that are not directly related to picture quality. The first is the absence of lens cover. The Nokia 8800 Arte's camera only relies on the fact that it is a tad sunk in the surface to avoid scratches. We don't find that enough for such a phone but the Nokia R&D team probably though that lens protection would ruin the design. Anyway, this is maybe the best reason to carry your phone around in the leather case that comes in the retail package.
The lack of a dedicated camera button is another real disappointment when it comes to operating the camera. It is quite uncomfortable, especially when shooting in landscape mode, to use the confirm button of the D-pad for that purpose. Besides, the function of the capture key changes to delete once a photo is taken which we don't quite understand. Although erasing a photo by accident is very unlikely, as confirmation is still required, we can't help wishing the Nokia designers did better here. Finally a few words about the camera speed. Nokia 8800 Arte is about as fast as the senior member of the prism family - the Nokia 7900. This means that it's a decent performer and it won't take ages to take a photo. Still, don't expect it to be as quick as the Sony Ericsson Cyber-shot phones. After all, the Arte doesn't presume to be a cameraphone.
The Nokia 8800 Arte also manages video recording. It can capture videos in VGA resolution, which is a great achievement. The frame rate is only 15fps and that is quite a downer, but nevertheless, on most occasions videos turn out nice. The videos are captured in 3GP format and their length is only limited by the free memory available. All in all, the Nokia 8800 Arte offers a very good performance for a non-cameraphone. Here is a sample video, so you check for yourselves.
Games
Gaming lovers will probably feel disappointed with the Nokia 8800 Arte preloaded content. It features a single game - Golf Tour. Although it has acceptable graphics and decent gameplay, we weren't amazed with it. Besides, we have seen it on dozens of handsets already.
Anyway, it is hard to imagine a Nokia 8800 Arte owner fooling around playing games on their mobile. Now, even this design-centered device can be turned into a portable gaming console with the dozens of compatible games available for download.
Conclusion
However tempted we are to call the Arte underpowered, we know better than messing with 150 grams of solid steel. Plus, is it just us or is the Arte adding some purpose to the 88xx series with UMTS? Oops, talking about functionality is actually an offense to the Arte and its likes. Nokia 8800 Arte is really exquisite and expensive, and it shows. And that's a good enough reason for the people who favor looks over performance.
Comparing the Arte to other handsets will be missing the point. Looking back to the Sirocco and the Luna, we can't help thinking that inevitably losing a fraction of their price with time, they lose a huge amount of appeal. It's just how things are in the small niche of mobile haute couture where Arte and Luna rub shoulders with Armani and Prada. Common sense is for the common folk.
