started shipping this week, amid reports last week of delays in shipping the device to those who preordered the phone. The N8 is Nokia’s latest attempt to regain its share of the smartphone market lost to the iPhone and Android phones, but the device has several shortcomings that would put off prospective buyers.

The N8 is Nokia’s flagship device, and it took its sweet time to arrive on the market. It was announced in April, and took almost six months to move to shipping status, eons in the world of technology. During this time, we have seen a new iPhone, several highbrow Android phones, and a flagship BlackBerry phone (see how they all stack up against each other).

Now, finally arriving in the hands of those who preordered it, the N8 will have to prove whether Nokia still has the edge in the smartphone market. But just like every other phone out there right now, the N8 packs a punch, yet it has some pretty damning shortcomings. Let’s explore both.

What’s Wrong With The Nokia N8

It’s underpowered: It runs on a 680MHz ARM 11 processor, which is behind with the times compared to most high-end smartphones the N8 is competing against, which have 1GHz processors. The N8 also comes only with 256MB of RAM memory, compared to double this amount on the iPhone 4, Motorola Droid X, or the T-Mobile G2. The slower processor coupled with the lower amount of RAM can make the N8 slow and unresponsive when demanding applications are run – which leads us to problem no. 2.

Symbian^3 is no match to iOS and Android: The OS was not designed with touchscreen use in mind, and it deeply rooted in the times when smartphones had a numerical keyboard and a couple of feature buttons. When it started launching smartphones with touchscreens, Nokia tried to revamp its OS, and bring it up to date. The N97 was one of the first attempts, which wasn’t very well received, and early hands-on reviews of the N8 with Symbian^3 are not favorable either. As for apps, the Nokia Ovi store has around 5,000 apps working with the N8, whereas the iOS App Store is host to more than a quarter-million apps, and the Android Market to almost 100,000.

You can’t get it cheap with a contract: Nokia did not secure deals with U.S. carriers to subsidize the price of the N8, so you can’t get it in the $200 range with a two-year plan, as with all the other top-end smartphones out there. Instead, you will have to pay around $550 for a N8, and then use your current AT&T or T-Mobile plan with it, and there’s no Verizon or Sprint version of the N8 at the moment.

What’s Cool About the Nokia N8

It has a great camera: 12-megapixel Carl Zeiss optics with autofocus and Xenon flash is enough to make any iPhone user green with envy. It can also shoot HD videos (720p@25fps), and uses geo-tagging for your photos, it has an ND filter, and face and smile detection, too – you might as well just put your compact camera up for sale on eBay. Oh, and there’s a front-facing camera for video chat as well (VGA 640×480 resolution), plus a dedicated camera button on the side.

HDMI and FM goodness: When it comes to playing the HD videos you shot with the N8, the phone has miniHDMI-out and composite capabilities, and it can output Dolby Digital Plus via HDMI. Music lovers will appreciate that the built-in FM radio tuner can also transmit music on the phone (to use for example wireless in your car). The phone also comes bundled with all the cables and adapters you need to connect it to your TV or stereo set, which is always a plus.

Free GPS navigation: The N8 comes bundled with Nokia’s Ovi Maps GPS navigation software, which unlike the system Google bundles with Android phones, has all the maps preloaded, so it’s not entirely dependent on 3G reception.

Does the Nokia N8 get the thumbs up from you, or is the iPhone and Android phones more up your street? Sound off in the comments.

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It’s been more than five months since Nokia announced the N8, the first in a new breed of Symbian OS-based phones that Nokia hopes will give cutting-edge handsets like the iPhone and the Motorola Droid X a run for their money.

Five months: That’s an eternity in today’s fast-moving tech world, where a span of even just five weeks between a phone’s announcement and release seems like a lengthy wait. To be fair, though, Nokia has always maintained that it would release the N8 in the third quarter of the year, and the Finnish phone giant says it’s finally started shipping the phone — just under the wire.

Boasting a 3.5-inch, 640-by-360-pixel, multitouch-enabled display; a Carl Zeiss optics-enhanced 12MP camera with a flash, auto-focus and HD video recording; and a 680MHz ARM11 processor under the hood, the half-inch-thick N8 marks the first Nokia phone powered by Symbian^3, the touch-friendly revamp of the aging but still widely used Symbian mobile platform.

With Symbian^3, Nokia’s mobile hardware at last enters the modern age of swipeable home screens, pinchable photos and Web pages, “rubberbanding” menus (which bounce when you reach the bottom or the top) and, of course, apps (through the just-relaunched Ovi store).

I took a brief test drive of the N8 in the summer and came away reasonably impressed. Unlike Nokia’s old (and disappointing, in my humble opinion) flagship, the N97, the N8 truly feels like a modern smartphone, replacing the N97’s squishy resistive touch display (which uses flexible layers of plastic to register taps) with a glass capacitive display, same as on the iPhone and the latest Android handsets.

Tapping and swiping through the N8’s various menus and screens also felt like something you’d expect from the iPhone or Android, with smooth scrolling and intuitive navigation.

The N8 also benefits from an impressive list of features like an HDMI video output, an FM transmitter (for broadcasting tunes over an FM radio), support for Dolby Digital Plus sound, and 16GB of onboard storage (plus a microSD memory slot).

But the N8’s interface still doesn’t feel as polished as what you’ll see on the iPhone 4 or, say, the Droid X or the Samsung Epic 4G. The basics of swiping, pinching and tapping are all there, but (if you ask me) the “wow” factor is missing: The menus are a little plain, screen transitions are utilitarian, the icons are a bit dull and so on. Given time and a few updates to the Symbian^3 OS, Nokia may well get there; for now, though, the N8 still feels like it’s playing a game of catch-up.

The N8 also faces an uphill battle in the U.S., where it has yet to find a carrier to subsidize its $550 price tag. (The N8 product page on Nokia’s North American site is taking pre-orders, with handsets to be delivered by the end of October.)

In any case, Nokia still has more arrows in its Symbian^3 quiver, in the form of the impressive-looking, business-oriented E7 QWERTY slider, plus a couple of slim social multimedia smartphones, the C6 and the C7 — all of which are due to ship worldwide before the year is out.

Nokia Conversations: Nokia N8 is shipping (photos)

— Ben Patterson is a technology writer for Yahoo! News.

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Droplr, Culturezoo’s dead-simple photo- and text-sharing service—which recently became a Mac Gem—now has an iPhone app.

Droplr is designed to alleviate the frustration that can often arise when trying to share a file, a link, or even just some text. Lengthy links and attachments can get finicky when conveyed via e-mail, and Twitter only deals in short bits of plain text. Droplr’s Mac client lets you drag-and-drop anything you want to share online, then automatically copies a short URL to your clipboard for use in e-mail, Twitter, or anywhere else you need to share something.

Now Droplr’s sharing convenience is on the iPhone. You can upload photos or videos, type something longer than Twitter’s 140-character limit, then share it anywhere online with a short Droplr URL. Existing users can manage their existing “drops,” and new users will be greeted by a handful of demo drops that offer an idea of how the service works. Droplr’s iPhone app also features thumbnails for images as well as icons that quickly identify other types of shared items.

A couple of new features have been added to the Droplr service since our Gems writeup in August. First, my primary gripe with Droplr has been resolved, as you can now manage your drops by signing into the Droplr Website. Previously, if you regretted uploading a photo or forgot to edit out something personal, there was no way to remove that content from Droplr’s servers. While the sharing URL you receive is private unless you hand it out to people, it’s still nice to see real management features added to the service.

The other new feature is the option of sharing your items with a custom domain. Instead of sharing your stuff at Droplr.com or the even more condensed drp.ly, you can purchase a “vanity domain” from a registrar and use it with Droplr. This means you can quickly share your stuff via Droplr, but from a domain that matches your business, blog, or other online venture.

The Droplr service offers 1GB of storage space for free right now, though Culturezoo is working on adding paid accounts with more space and other options. You also need a Twitter account to register and sign-in, though that should also change soon. Droplr for iPhone costs $4 and is available now in the App Store, requiring an iPhone or iPod touch with iOS 3.0 or later.

WordPress for iOS version 2.6 is now available in the App Store. Announced late Wednesday, the new version introduces several much-requested new features to the popular blogging app for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.

Chief among the enhancements is vastly improved video support. You can now shoot and post video from your iPhone 3GS or iPhone 4 directly to your WordPress blog.

The update also includes better support for Local Drafts, to prevent posts from going missing. And to give your unpublished blog posts even more protection, the WordPress iOS app now autosaves your posts as you create them, just like the Web version does.

WordPress says that the update also includes a slew of other bug fixes and enhancements. The app is free and requires iOS 3.0.2 or later.

HELSINKI – Nokia Corp. said Thursday it has begun shipments of its N8 model, a handset that aims to challenge RIM’s Blackberry and Apple’s iPhone in the smart phone market.

The news pushed Nokia stock up 2 percent, to close at euro7.35 ($10.03) on the Helsinki Stock Exchange.

Nokia said deliveries would begin immediately for pre-orders of the touch screen model, which had received “the highest amount of consumer pre-orders in Nokia history.” Worldwide availability would be “in the coming weeks” and will vary by country, Nokia said.

The N8, which looks like an iPhone, features a 12-megapixel digital camera with Carl Zeiss optics and a 3.5 inch display. It is built on a new version of the Symbian software with photo uploading connections to social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

On Sept. 10, Nokia replaced its Finnish CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo with Microsoft executive Stephen Elop, a Canadian, the first time the company appointed a non-Finn at its helm.

The choice of a North American executive to lead a Finnish company was seen as reflecting the increasing dominance of U.S. and Canadian companies in the evolution of the top end mobile phone business.

Apple Inc.’s iPhone has set the standard for today’s smart phones, while Research In Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerrys are the favorite of the corporate set. More recently, Google Inc.’s Android software has emerged as the choice for phone makers that want to challenge the iPhone.

Pressure had been growing on the 57-year-old Kallasvuo, who had joined the company in 1982, as markets and consumers expected something fresh and new from a company that once had the innovative edge in the industry.

That did not happen in the four years that Kallasvuo was chief executive and he was also unsuccessful at tacking problems in the North American market — the company’s worst performer — despite a pledge to make it a top priority when he was appointed CEO in 2006.

Although it is still the world leader in handset sales — with a 33 percent market share — Nokia has been slow to detect new trends, like folding clamshell models and touch screen handsets.

Nokia board chairman Jorma Ollila said Thursday that he expects Elop “to bring oxygen” to Nokia.

“He will bring new vitality activity to the company,” Ollila said in an interview with Finnish broadcaster YLE. “The job is very demanding and there are big projects involved. He has excellent experience in the industry and as a manager of the kind of change now facing Nokia.”

Nokia, based in Espoo near Helsinki, employs 130,000 people worldwide.

Last year, it sold 432 million mobile devices.

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Online:

http://www.nokia.com