I love the fact that most of the new devices have enough onboard memory that I'm able to use one device for everything. I love having music at my fingertips and the N8 is an easy one to load. I'm not a big fan of the Nokia desktop software and am not even sure it'll run on a Mac but transfering music proved to be pretty easy. I connected the phone to the computer as a harddrive (you have to select a the USB setting: Settings --> Connectivity --> USB --> Mass Storage) and simply dragged the music over into the "Sounds" folder. One thing I noticed is that not all of the CD covers moved as well which may have something to do with my specific settings rather than the phone. I found them later in the photos file of the phone.

The built-in music player is easy to use and navigate with options to organize by song, album, artist or genre. There's no horizontal mode for the player but it does have a similar album cover scroll option which the Apple devices uses. It's not the prettiest layout but it's functional.

I do like the album view which gives you both the album cover and the list of songs contained in the album.


The desktop is also quite handy and gives quick access to the music library which I like.


One feature that I absolutely love is the Playlists wich features one of the best things I've seen recently: a "Recently Added" playlist which is automatically updated when you add new music. This is a feature I loved on the Zune which I miss dearly on the iPhone and which makes an appearance here.

With all the good stuff the music player has going for it, it's lacking a few features which I can't live without. The first is real-time scrobbling. This feature is also not available on the iPhone directly but I found a few apps that did the trick. Searching through the vault of Symbian apps hasn't uncovered an app with similar capabilities. There also isn't an option to create playlists on the go which is something I miss dearly from the N900.

Though it doesn't wow, music on the N8 is functional and easy to use. Just wish it had a few additional bells and whistles to make it a show stopper.