HTC Incredible S vs Nokia N8

The mobile world seems to suddenly be awash with smartphones, which incorporate stylish good-looks, high end cameras and an immersive user experience. But with so many options out there, it’s easy to get bogged down with the amount of handsets available, so we thought we’d give you a head-to-head of two of the markets biggest sellers, the Nokia N8 and the HTC Incredible S, to help you decide which big-screened beauty is the one for you.

Screen
 The Nokia N8 has a 3.5-inch AMOLED capacitive touchscreen, displaying 16 million colours and 360 x 640 pixels, which gives a rich and responsive experience. The Incredible S has a slightly larger S-LCD capacitive touchscreen, at 4-inches, and displays 480 x 800 pixels.


Internals
The HTC Incredible S has some impressive workings under the bonnet, including  1.1 GB ROM, 768 MB RAM, a 1 GHz Scorpion processor and dedicated graphics, in the shape of an Adreno 205 GPU, which means this handset should be up to any task you can throw at it. The Nokia N8, on the other hand, has a surprising 256MB RAM and 512 MB ROM and a 680 MHz ARM 11 processor.


Camera
The Nokia N8 is undoubtedly the one to beat when it comes to camera prowess. Sporting a highly impressive 12-megapixel snapper with Carl Zeiss optics, autofocus, Xenon flash, 1/1.83-inch sensor size, ND filter, geo-tagging, face detection and video capture in 720P HD, it’s considered the best mobile camera ever to be made. The Incredible S is no slouch either, offering an 8-megapixel camera, with auto focus and duel-LED flash and, it too, captures HD video in 720P.


Design
 It’s unusual, these days, to come across a phone which doesn’t follow the ‘big screen, minimal buttons’ trend in mobile design, and that’s exactly where the manufacturers of these handsets have chosen to take them. The N8 has one small button on the front and small, discreet buttons on the sides for the volume and camera. There’s also an HDMI-out slot on the top of the device, which is neatly hidden under a pop-out cover.


Operating System
 Nokia has suffered a lot of criticism over its decision to usethe Symbian^3 operating system on the Nokia N8 and, in fact, has suffered loss of sales due to the disinclination of consumers to buy into an operating system which is considered to be behind the pack. We think this is a shame, as the hardware has so much potential, and with the reported update due we’re keeping an eye on the N8. The Incredible S runs the ever-popular Android operating system, and HTC has chosen to release it running version 2.2 (Froyo), but offering an upgrade to the newest iteration, 2.4 (Gingerbread).

So it’s a clear win for the HTC Incredible S, showing that it’s all-round reliability which wins us over, rather than one outstanding feature on a relatively average handset.