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The Nokia 808 PureView uses Symbian Belle Feature Pack 1 (FP1) as its backbone operating system (OS) which is the latest incarnation of the Symbian^3 platform which initially released on the Nokia N8 and is based on many years of Symbian development.
As with Symbian Belle you can add an extra two Homescreens to the default 4 user configurable screens, or delete them to reduce down to the minimum of one.
Transitions between landscape and portrait screen orientation, when the phone is rotated, are a little more polished in the latest Belle FP1 OS, with the screen image zooming out slightly when rotating, and then expanding in its new orientation.
When it comes to homescreen widgets, the Nokia 808 PureView comes well stocked, out of the box, with 46 widget options once the Social and Maps apps have been updated and the Microsoft Office apps have been installed via Software Update.
These include clock, calendar, contacts and mail options as well as; four Social App options (Social app, Facebook, Facebook Summary and Twitter), five Maps Suite options, six media related options plus a whole host of others for you to play around with.
With so many widgets on offer, you may be a little disappointed that you're limited to just six homescreens, as you could easily fill more than that if you wished.
There is a useful Mobile Data Tracker which displays either the total amount of mobile data used since resetting counters, or the ability to set it to display the amount of data allowance remaining in a user defined period.
The 'Nokia Recommends' widget is really just a full width app icon, wasting screen real estate which opens the namesake app providing lists of the top albums and tracks which can be purchased from the Nokia Music Store.
Although Symbian Anna and Belle brought a more Android-looking OS, the major disappointment for long standing Symbian users is that whilst Apple finally acknowledged the advantage of folders in the Main Menu, Nokia has reduced this same functionality removing folder in folder support in the Main Menu structure.
The initial out of the box appearance of the main menu has all apps in a flat structure which can be either user "arranged" or automatically sorted in alphabetical order via either a long press in the main window or tapping on the menu button (bottom right).
A further disappointment is that all folders have the same basic icon making it harder to differentiate at a glance.
Luckily two third party apps are available from the Nokia Store to counter this, in the form of FolderIcon and Thumbnail Folders which enable the user to assign their own folder icons or replace the folder icons with new icons showing thumbnails generated from the apps contained within.
Another function we miss on Windows Phone and iOS is the profile support provided on Symbian, which can be automated by installing the third party Situations apps from the Nokia Store enabling automatic switching between profiles including silencing the Nokia 808 PureView at night and switching on/off Power Save mode.
But additional to this simple example, a number of phone settings (Profile switching, Mobile Data toggle, WiFi toggle, BT toggle, Power Save toggle, SMS reply and App lauching) can be switched based on time, calendar events, connectivity (WiFi/BT) or location (Cell Tower/GPS).
The combination of the standard Symbian profile support and this third party app makes for a powerful feature.
