Fancy a new phone for Christmas? Why not try the Nokia N8?

If you are looking for a great looking phone which is packed with features and includes a great camera with a full 12 megapixel sensor, then the Nokia N8 could well be your ideal choice.

This smartphone uses the latest operating system from Symbian, the Symbian 3, and it is a radical improvement on the Symbian 2. It includes multi-touch zoom and single touch tap which, when combined with the new 3.5 inch OLED touch screen which has replaced the previous Nokia resistive screen with capacitive technology, means that that you can navigate through your phone, applications, email, browser and photo albums etc. with remarkable ease and speed.

The body of the phone is manufactured from aluminum which has a much better feel than the plastic from which the majority of mobile phones are made. The body features a single button on its face which gives it an appealing minimalist appearance. Although the 12 megapixel camera is excellent, Nokia have been forced to raise it slightly from the back face of the phone so it protrudes just a little, but that is more than compensated for by the Carl Zeiss lens, the autofocus and the fast xenon flash. The colour rendering and image quality are as good as a decent compact camera and far better than the camera found on an iPhone. Depth of field and automatic colour temperature control are also outstanding.

There is also full 720p HD video which also uses the noise cancelling microphone to record high quality stereo sound. Neither should you run out of memory. There is 16 GB built in and there is a micro SD card holder which can hot-swap 32 GB cards. You can also output your video to your HD television via a micro HDMI port.

The N8 is the best touch screen phone that Nokia has produced and provides multiple home screens along with widgets and a very much improved user interface. Although the previous Symbian operating system had been considerably outpaces by alternatives such as the Apple and Android operating systems, Symbian 3 has to a large extent breached the gap and it no longer suffers from the software lag experienced in some earlier Nokia phones.