Nokia 8800 Gold Arte review: Born with a silver spoon

Music player does the job

The music player in Nokia 8800 Gold Arte is identical to those found in the other Series 40 devices (like Nokia 6600 slide for example). Looks have improved but all remains unchanged featurewise. The music player sorts songs by artist, album and genre. The great advantage over the other Arte siblings is that the inbuilt storage has been boosted to 4 GB.

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

The player works with MP3, MIDI, AAC, AAC+, and WMA formats. The supported A2DP profile allows you to listen through 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 turn out to be tricky.

The sonic experience of the player is enhanced by an equalizer and a stereo expansion function. Nokia 8800 Gold Arte has only one loudspeaker located on the side, right next to the camera. We already mentioned that we weren't terribly impressed by its performance.

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 Gold Arte, something the Luna 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 and 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: C'mon, Nokia, it's time for some improvements

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 photo 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 Gold 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 in 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 it's not actually that useful a function.

The three different gallery views

The pictures can also be viewed in fullscreen and can be edited with the built-in picture editor. The editor however offers very limited options, but considering very few users 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 large folders. Nonetheless, the gallery on Series 40 devices could be improved a lot, especially in terms of user friendliness and we do hope that at some point in the future the file manager and the gallery on these phones will be separate applications.