Every year, like the swallows returning from Capistrano or the tourists returning to Disneyworld Paris, Nokia releases a flagship phone. Sadly, the boatwrights at Nokia haven’t dropped a winner in nigh on three years now and, if early reports are to believed, their new N8 is not looking seaworthy.

The N8 looks like the Motorola Devour and has a 3.5-inch OLED, capacitive touch screen, and all of the fun things you expect like compass and accelerometer. On paper, it seems great. It also uses Symbian^3 which, again, according to early reports, its just like Symbian^1 and Symbian^2. In other words, the more things change at Nokia, the more they stay the same.

Granted Nokia sells mores phones a second than Apple sells in a year and if you’re a big Nokia fan you have reason to be excited. After all, it’s not every day that Nokia releases a phone that apparently takes design cues from the real world as opposed to the muted expectations of a surly Finn. We’re going to try to get our hands on this thing but until that day let’s just stare at her ageless beauty.

Size: 113.5 x 59 x 12.9 mm
Weight (with battery): 135 g
Volume: 86 cc
12 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics
Fullscreen 16:9 viewfinder with easy-to-use touchscreen parameters
Xenon flash
Face recognition software
Autofocus
Focal length: 5.4 mm
F number/Aperture: F2.8
Still images file format: JPEG/EXIF
Zoom up to 2x (digital) for still images
Zoom up to 3x (digital) for video
Secondary camera for video calls (VGA, 640 x 480 pixels)
Internal memory: 16 GB
MicroSD memory card slot, hot swappable, up to 32GB
High-Speed microUSB to PC connectivity
Physical keys (Menu key, Power key, Lock key, volume keys, Camera key)
Finger touch support for text input and UI control
On-screen alphanumeric keypad and full keyboard
Dedicated camera and volume keys
Possibility to use capacitive stylus
Handwriting recognition for Chinese

Full Spec Sheet