oh yeah
As usual the best way to judge a cameraphone performance is to compare it to another one of the kind. The choice went naturally to the Samsung i8510 INNOV8, which is easily one of the best 8 meagapixel cameraphones released to date.
The 28mm (in 35mm terms) wide-angle lens, autofocus and dual-LED flash it is some pretty pretty impressive equipment as far as hardware is concerned. A xenon flash would have left very little more to be demanded but we guess Nokia doesn't favor those anymore.
However being the first handset to feature 28mm lens, the Nokia N86 8MP is still guaranteed to excite every proper geek out there. For those of you unfamiliar with the material we will explain that the 28mm lens gives you roughly 20 percent larger angle of view when looking through the viewfinder.
To make this advantage even more obvious, here's a collage illustrating the framing difference between a regular cameraphone and the wide-angle Nokia N86 8MP.
The wide-angle lens is especially useful when taking landscape and architecture photos as you don't need to go as far back to fit the whole subject in the frame.
On the negative side wide-angle lens aren't as suitable for photographing portraits from close range as people's faces turn out unnaturally distorted. It's not that 35mm is that great for making portraits either but 28mm is even worse.
Another disadvantage of the 28mm lens is that fitting more stuff in the same frame means that the things in it are actually smaller (described by fewer pixels, if you wish) and if you don't need the extra angle of view you are loosing some scene detail.
Mind you, all other things equal, we would take a 28mm wide angle cameraphone any day - it's just seems more suited for all-purpose walk-around uses.
Another cameraphone innovation found on the Nokia N86 8MP is its variable aperture. It's not technically a first since the Motorola Motozine ZN5 was the pioneer here but it's still rare enough.
In layman's terms, theory says the variable aperture allows the camera to choose either the benefit of better-than-standard light sensitivity or better-than-standard sharpness throughout the photo.
And to use the proper terminology, Nokia N86 8MP shoots at F/2.4 to let more light in low-light conditions and stops down to F/3.2 or F/4.8 when light conditions allow it. Technically the photos at smaller apertures (indicated by a larger F-stop value) should be sharper and with larger depth of field than photos shot by any other 8 megapixel cameraphone on the market.
Unfortunately Nokia didn't give the users any kind of manual control over the aperture value and it is all automatic. We are not saying that such an option will be used too much but why not give the occasional enthusiastic user the choice.
And finally, the N86 8MP camera also has a mechanical shutter (much like Samsung i8510 INNOV8, Nokia N73, Sony Ericsson K800 and K850). As a mechanical way of stopping light making its way to the sensor, it takes care of the vertical stripes that appear in the highlights of high-contrast images also known as smear, as well as the wavy distortion that sometimes appears if you move the camera while shooting.
(non smart/No smart OS) 
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