Nov 1, 2010 08:31 GMT  ·  By

Hot on the heels of the successful 2010 FIFA World Cup in which it was the only African global sponsor, MTN has added the critically acclaimed Nokia N8 smartphone to its offering. MTN Group is a major multinational telecommunication company, which operates in 21 countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

MTN Group announced recently that it will start selling Nokia's Nseries flagship smartphone, the N8, thus becoming the first operator in South Africa to release the device on the market.

“We have taken a deliberate device strategy to focus on handsets that matter most to our customers. To this end, we have made the iconic Nokia N8 available. As of yesterday [31.10.2010], MTN customers can purchase this iconic device from selected MTN retail stores,” says Serame Taukobong, chief marketing officer at MTN South Africa.

To date MTN Group has introduced other top tier smartphones, such as Apple iPhone 4 and Blackberry Torch, thus strengthening its presence on the African mobile phone market.

“The smartphones we have introduced to date on our network, including the Apple iPhone 4 and the BlackBerry Torch, are underpinned by the significant investment we have made in our network to ensure that it meets the exacting bandwidth demands of these smart devices,” continues Taukobong.

The Nokia N8 is powered by an ARM 11 680 MHz processor (3D Graphics HW accelerator) and runs on the Symbian^3 platform. The main attraction of the smartphone is the 12-megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, autofocus, Xenon flash, ND filter, geo-tagging and face detection functions, which performs admirably.

The Symbian smartphone comes with a large 3.5-inch AMOLED capacitive touchscreen with 16 million colors display and 360x640 pixel resolution.

Even though one of the carrier's officials stated that the N8 is already available in selected MTN retail stores starting this week, the company's online shop still takes only pre-orders for the smartphone.

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MTN's N8 pre-ordering page
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