Nokia 8800 Carbon Arte review: Carbon copy

Music player does the job

The music player in Nokia 8800 Carbon Arte is identical to the one found in Nokia 7900 Prism. Looks have improved over the 6500 classic for example, but all remains unchanged featurewise. The music player sorts songs by artist, album and genre. The great advantage over the other Arte siblings is the boosted inbuilt storage of 4 GB.

The new music player skin is a real looker • the classic design is also available

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 classic 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 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 Carbon 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.

The sonic enhancements on the phone

On the positive side, we have to mention that it does not get muffled at all when the phone body is placed on its back.

Unfortunately, there is no FM radio on Nokia 8800 Carbon 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.

Gallery needs improvement

We personally aren't great fans of how the gallery looks in Series 40 models. The fact that it also acts as a file manager somewhat hurts its user-friendliness and looks. For example you do need a few extra presses to get to your music files, as there is no file filtering. The Gallery relies on your putting the right type of files in the right folder.

The gallery of Nokia 8800 Carbon Arte is not the most user-friendly around

There are three different views for the gallery: list with details, list and grid. Once you pick a picture you can zoom on it to see more detail. Zooming itself is not the fastest thing around and doesn't allow a picture to be zoomed in too closely, so actually it is not much of a help.

The three different gallery views

The pictures can also be viewed in fullscreen and can be edited with the built-in picture editor. The latter however offers very limited options, but considering the fact that there are very few users that actually use a picture editor on their phones, this is understandable.

Looking on a picture allows fullscreen mode and zooming

The final extras of the gallery include the available Slideshow and Search options. The latter can be quite convenient for finding a specific file in overfed folders. Nonetheless, the gallery on Series 40 devices could be improved a lot. That goes true especially in user friendliness and we do hope that sometime in the future the file manager and the gallery of these phones will be separate applications.