Nokia 808 PureView

Maps

As with all Nokia Symbian devices the Nokia 808 PureView comes with Nokia Maps Suite, arguably the best Mobile Sat Nav available, with free global, offline maps from NavTeq, voice guidance with text-to-speech street names, live traffic updates and speed limit and safety camera warnings.

The Suite includes the basic Maps app which provides either walking navigation, or switches to the Drive app for vehicular Sat Nav functionality.

Destinations can be found by text searching, Point of Interest (POI) browsing, location selection from the map screen or direct integration with the Contacts app.

Other apps within the Maps Suite are Weather, Guides and Map Loader which each do what their names imply.

The final two apps are Check In, which provides locational geo-status updates, and Public Transport, which provides scheduled public transport information for 87 cities around the world.

GPS acquisition is fast and GPS fix is stable with the help of Assisted GPS, Wi-Fi/Network and Network Based Assistance.

A little testing proved that even with all assistance turned off the fix was still stable although, as expected the initial acquisition took longer.

Apps

Out of the box the Nokia 808 PureView came stocked with all of the usual Contacts, Calendar, Web, Music and Video apps provided on all smartphones, with a few interesting extras including Silent Film which is a simple little video recording app with the ability to apply effects, a separate music soundtrack and edit the speed of playback to create silent movies.

Once created movies can be upload to YouTube, Facebook, e-mail or just save to the phone as well as submitting to the developers site.

Having mentioned YouTube, this brings us onto what initially looks like a YouTube app icon, which when pressed disappointingly turns out to be a web-app.

Why can't this be the office Symbian YouTube app instead, which can be downloaded for free from http://m.google.com/youtube and provides a much more satisfying user interface and functionality?

Moving on from third party video apps the Nokia 808 PureView is shipped with ColorizIt, which is another simple app which applies a black and white filter to images and enables you to draw the original colour back into the image.

This app was somewhat disappointing as there are much better apps in the Nokia Store including additional filtering and colour manipulation.

If you've ever heard a track playing and wanted to know what it is, then you'll be glad that Shazam is also included in the out of the box experience, and finally you get a CNN and a National Geographic app providing news information.

When it comes to productivity apps the Nokia 808 PureView comes with Vlingo, a network based voice recognition app enabling voice dial and text functionality along with World Traveller which is your business travel companion providing free world clock, currency converter for free with flight information added for a small fee.

Somewhat of a confusing remnant of past Symbain devices is the continued presence of QuickOffice on the Nokia 808 PureView.

A quick trip to Software Update either on device or via PC whilst connected to Nokia Suite, provides free Microsoft Office, OneNote, Lync and Communicator app downloads as a result ofNokias recent Microsoft partnership.

Last but not least Nokia has again preloaded F-Secure, a firewall and anti-virus app for the paranoid out there as in all the years we have tested and owned Nokia Symbian devices we have never encountered a virus on any of them.

If you do want to add to the selection of preloaded apps you can head to the Nokia Store either on-device, or via Nokia Suite on the web or via the Nokia Suite desktop application.

Now that the Nokia (previously known as OVI) Store has been around for a few years there's an app in there for you no matter what your need is - although the choice pales into insignificance when compared to the might of Google Play and the Apple App store.