Nokia 8800 Carbon Arte review: Carbon copy

Ask not what your phone can do for you. It's Nokia Arte, folks, so the question is who you need to kill to have it. Exquisite materials, sophisticated slider design and state-of-the-art finish are doing their best to camouflage the fact that there isn't much your phone can actually do for you. In geeky terms, that is.

But hey, we never held that against the Arte series. That Arte tag is just a sin tax and there's obviously people out there that can live with it. Cast in the same mold as its forerunners, Nokia Carbon Arte is topping the familiar OLED screen, 3G and 3 megapixel camera with carbon fiber and titanium and 4GB of inbuilt memory. Sounds like we've been there already but a glimpse of Arte is always a treat.

   
Key features
Yells expensive (and it does cost an arm and a leg) 
Body made of the highest quality materials 
2-inch 16M-color OLED display of QVGA resolution 
3G support 
3 megapixel camera with autofocus 
Full-house retail package 
Decent battery life 
Fingerprint resistant surface on the back 
Turn-to-mute 
Tap-for-time 
4GB internal memory 
Series 40 5th edition user interface 
Main disadvantages
Smallish display with poor sunlight legibility 
Tri-band only 
No memory expansion 
Costs an arm and a leg 
Below-par camera performance 
No video calls 

Nokia 8800 Carbon Arte is the third Nokia handset that comes to fill the gaping chasm between regular fashion phones (LG Black Label series, Samsung co-branded offerings) and out-of-this-world-expensive handsets (read: Vertu and the likes). Dressed to kill and priced to draw blood, Arte is so impressive it's intimidating. Thank goodness it's underpowered enough for many people to use as an excuse. Saves face, doesn't it?