Some days ago, after the announcement of the Nokia N8, the first thing wich i had on my mind : Should i drop my Omnia HD for the N8? Should i keep em both?

What's hot about the N8?

Let me highlight the USB On-The-Go feature on the N8 witch defines a dual-role device, which can act as either a host or peripheral, and can connect to either a PC or other portable devices through the same connector with the help of the adapter inbox to connect your USB memory sticks and hard drives. There's obviously a power limitation that N8 can supply so some of the bigger hard drives need an external power supply, so, yes, you can copy big files from hard drives without PC. There is one limitation with the filesizes, max is 4GB, it comes from FAT32 system...

I really don't know if there'll be Bluetooth 3.0 or simply Bluetooth 2.1 +EDR, it seems that this is subject of change before the device is released...

HDMI output is really nice addition, i've been waiting for this features since my Omnia HD, video player and photos come out with 720p, rest of the UI is upscaled from nHD. E.g. Media wall UI looks cool on TV

Up to three customisable home screens: Widgets, Themes, Shortcuts, Icons, Menu [well, i already have this on the Omnia HD's touch wizz somewhat or on my N900 (up to 9 homescreens) ]

Flash Lite 4.0 (comes with compatibility to Flash 10 video) is nice addition too (i'm looking forwad to see it performs against my N900)

HTML support for email finally...

Conversational view for SMS finally...(Free-iSMS does a nice job on my Omnia HD)

12 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics (finally), and also with a very large sensor (the same sensor size as the Canon G11) 47% bigger than those in competing 12mp camera phones with ND Filter !

Xenon flash finally ! But no additional LED (or Dual LED) for video recording at low condition..."We simply didn’t have the space for the Dual LED as well as Xenon, the area around the camera is really packed!" Nokia said...)

Video capture in 720p 25 fps with codecs H.264, MPEG-4, ok, but will it be as good as the Omnia HD nicely colored videos? Maybe, but what's the most interesting is that N8 will have active hyper-focal distance (alternative of continuous auto focus). Subjects from 60cm up to infinity remain in focus when you’re shooting,

Dolby Digital Plus surround sound when played with HDMI and a home theatre and stereo sound recording for the video cam, thanks to the two mics to record audio in videos. One near the lens (for the general atmosphere), and the other one located at the usual spot (for voice capture).

Video editing software, hmm why not, Samsung didn't want to include this, i still don't know why...

Symbian ^3 of course, i think it's still the most feature packed OS (even if i have an N900), i'll be happy if we'll get the best software/hardware compromise here ;)

Pinch zoom (On Web browser, email, gallery) not a big deal, but a nice addition ^^

It can play .mkv files, support for Divx/Xvid possible by the time of release, doesn’t exist currently...

By the way, If the phone hangs, press the power key for 8 seconds to reboot. they wanted to create a robust, one-piece device that feels good in the hand, therefore the integrated battery can not be replaced by the user

That's being said :

- nHD resolution while the competitor are at 800×480 and beyond by Q3/10 is somewhat disappointing...

- 680Mhz single issue ARM app-processor? I hope that Symbian^3 will handle that very well especially with the UI, Speed and give us a real 25Fps rate (on video recording) and not 22 or 21 as the Omnia HD (didn't test the Vivaz to see how it performs) ;)

- 1200mAh battery and not 1500+ mAh is really annoying, i hope Symbian^3 will be the right deal with that !

- No touch-to-focus...

- No strereo speaker ! It uses one speaker. It’s in the camera raised area, It’s the most powerful speaker Nokia use. We use a small dedicated power amplifier to drive it as hard as possible (In evaluation it was found that one larger speaker with this amplifier vs two smaller ones sounded better. It may not have the stereo speakers of other devices but this approach in use sounds better) Nokia said...