*UPDATE*
The N8 is being launched on the 12th of November 2010
Ken Oyolla, the General Manager for Nokia East and Southern Africa, had this to say “With the N8, and the new Symbian software, we are bringing a familiar, faster and more intuitive user experience to the world’s most popular smartphone platform. "
The new software he's refering to is Symbian S^3, Nokias replacement for the ageing S60 platform.
Symbian S^3 teems with over 250 new features including multiple personalised homescreens, multipoint touch HDMI and support for something Nokia calls "Intelligent Networking". You can find a full set of new features here.
In addition to the brand new OS the N8 will also be the first Nokia to ship with support for the Qt Developer framework. Qt allows open source and commercial software developers to code less, create more and deploy everywhere. With Qt, developers can build innovative applications and touch-enabled user interfaces once and then deploy across all major mobile, desktop, consumer electronic and embedded platforms without rewriting the code.
In English, what this means is that it will be easier for developers to create apps for the N8 and all future S^3 powered devices.
Enough about the software now, let me move on to the hardware.
The N8 packs a 3.5 inch AMOLED screen , 16 GB onboard storage (which you will definitely need seeing as it has a 12 megapixel camera) , 256MB RAM and 512 MB ROM. The radio chips run HSDPA, 10.2 Mbps; HSUPA, 2.0 Mbps and Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n with UPnP technology.
All this is powered by a 680 MHz ARM 11 processor, not as powerful as the Nexus Ones 1GHz monster but with a 3D graphics hardware accelerator you're not likely to notice a marked difference in performance between the two. The rest of the specs you can get here
End of the day this looks like an amazing phone, it should be a viable alternative to the android powered HTCs and the iPhone,
Hope it also has a flashlight :-)
*UPDATE*
The phone will retail at between Shs. 41,999 at Safaricom Retail centres with a free 300MB bundle thrown in