Nokia Lumia 800 Review

The Nokia Lumia 800 is the first Windows Phone handset to jump from the Microsoft and Nokia affiliation declared in February, and we have got our hands on an early on sample to check it out. According to CEO Stephen Elop, The Nokia Lumia 800 is the first real Windows Phone, other products made by HTC and Samsung have been reasonable enough, however they don't present the firmness of the new Lumia 800.

Let's start the review with its appearance. The handset - The Nokia Lumia 800 carves up its external styling with the formerly considerably less glorified Nokia N9. The handset is a Meego-based smartphone even though the screen size is reduced from 3.9" to 3.7" in order to adjust to the Windows Phone specification list.

The operating system of the Nokia Lumia 800 currently possesses more than 40,000 apps, as well, thus the two companies can assert that the joint venture is by now getting increased momentum for Microsoft's outstanding operating system.

The retail package of the Nokia Lumia 800 is emblematical in favor of the price range. Below are the accessories that you will get when you unbox the handset:

• A rubber case in the same color as your phone
• A compact, oddly shaped charger
• MicroUSB cable that can be connected with the charger to charge the phone
• The single piece headset

The rubber case provided with the Nokia Lumia 800 not only barely changes the look of your handset but also makes it thicker too. Furthermore, the protection from the scratches does not compromise with the good looks of the phone.

Employing the design of the ill-omened Nokia N9, the Lumia 800 makes for a curved polycarbonate framework that is tinted from end to end, making it light in the hand and dreadfully tough to damage.

In addition to this the curved nature of the framework of the Lumia 800 contributes a precise design aesthetic to the phone, setting it out well from the reams of sharp looking colossus and heavy weighted handsets on the market at the moment.

Advantages

• The physical appearance of the Nokia Lumia 800 is a reverie to watch and handle, with its smooth curves fitting comfortably to the hand both with and without the protective case supplied in the purchase packaging.
• The Nokia Lumia 800 measures 116.5 x 61.2 x 12.1 mm which is precisely the same as that of the Nokia N9 along with this it weighs around 142g which is 7g heavier than its MeeGo counterpart.
• The Nokia Lumia 800 comes in three different colors that are black, cyan and magenta.
• The Lumia 800 bears the screen size of 3.7" with the 800x480 pixels resolution.

Disadvantages

• The Nokia Lumia 800 is undemanding to spot in a crowd, with the characteristic amalgamation of curves and straight lines it easily can be misidentified for the Nokia N9.
• Although it makes a claim to be the most attractive yet it is not the slimmest Windows Phone.
• There's not only no microSD card slot, there's no 64GB version like there is with the N9. So, the 16GB is all that you will get in the Lumia 800.
• Another downside of the Nokia Lumia 800 is its relatively rare standard of MicroSIM card slot that is not so common among the carriers and therefore, you will be required to either get your regular SIM card swapped by your carrier or cut it down to the size that can fit to the SIM try well.

The biggest difference between the Nokia Lumia 800 and other Nokia cell phones is the fact that the Nokia Lumia 800 uses the Microsoft Windows Phone operating system. For sure, the system itself is not anything new, releasing its most recent avatar (WP 7.5) on the HTC Titan and HTC Radar sooner this year.

The most important point in favor of and against WP7 for several is that it looks entirely different to iPhone, Android, Symbian and Meego seeing that the idea of application grids is nowhere to be found out.

Advantages

• It's a clean and simple interface. You would enjoy the effortless way to link together contacts with a whoosh of a finger as well as the simple Live Tiles to facilitate glimpse information in a flash.
• Repositioning tiles around is also extremely simple as it only requires a long press and followed by dragging them to the preferred location.
• Adding tiles to the Start screen is also quite easy, simply left swipe to the apps list, long press an app and then choose "pin to start". If you wish to remove a tile from the Start Screen, simply long press on the tile on the Start page and after that tap the drawing pin with a line through it.
• The biggest advantage the Nokia Lumia 800 has got over other similar phones is multitasking. The Lumia 800 comes with 7.5 Mango. Even though the OS still doesn't do true multitasking yet things are being performed the iOS way. To put it in simple, apps that are not in the forefront are suspended however the OS possesses means to take over and accomplish the task for them.

Disadvantages

• The Lumia 800 employs a totally untouched interface regardless of all the talk that Nokia possibly will be allowed to alter the Windows Phone interface. Even though, it's fine with us, however there's not anything to distinguish it from the competition.

The camera is correspondingly cool. Despite the fact that it does not have the speed of the Xperia Arc S or the iPhone 4S, the picture quality is unambiguous and brilliant whereas the ability to rapidly post to Facebook and tag your buddies is another tech-feather in the Windows Phone 7.5 Mango cap is also amazing. It is an uncomplicated thing, nevertheless everybody loves taking photos, and this makes it more easygoing.

Windows Phones have got a huge advantage over most competitors with dictated camera button. In addition to this the chrome key on the Nokia Lumia is outstanding. Simply hold it down from anywhere on the phone even under the locked screen and you will be photographing away in seconds.

Advantages

• The Nokia Lumia 800 possesses an 8MP camera with very much to boast about. The handset has a 28mm wide-angle F2.2 lens by Carl Zeiss that produces 8MP photos with 4:3 aspect ratio or 7.1MP photos if you want 16:9 aspect ratio for your shots.
• The camera UI is comparatively uncomplicated. You get your viewfinder and some controls on the right, still or video camera toggle, virtual zoom buttons and the extended setting menu from top to bottom. The flash can be fixed to auto, forced or off.
• The interface for the video camera recording is also relatively simple and also is identical to the still camera interface. Features offered here are calibrate contrast, saturation and sharpness, scenes, change the white balance or exposure compensation, image effects. Furthermore, you can also use the LED as a video light.

Disadvantages

• The results of video recording with the Nokia Lumia 800 although are good but still it is not the quality that we're looking for. It's limited to 720p, which is now within the reach of cheaper smartphones.
• Constant autofocus is available when recording that gets really annoying because the Lumia 800 is way too eager to hunt for focus - if there is continuous action in the scene, the Lumia 800 would refocus every several seconds and there is no way out to lock the focus.

The Nokia Lumia 800 comes with a single-core 1.4GHz processor inside the Lumia 800 and 16GB of internal storage, and an 8mp camera on the back. The handset performs perfectly well enough with 512MB of RAM. Most importantly, what this device has done simply is to give Windows Phone the flagship hardware that it has deserved ever since the Mango update. Even though, this does not make the Nokia Lumia 800 as compelling product as the top Android phone yet it successfully puts the Windows back in the game.

Advantages

• The battery time of the Nokia Lumia 800 is 780 minutes GSM talk time and 265hrs GSM standby in contrast to 410 minutes and 460hrs from the HTC Titan.
• To give support to battery management, the Lumia 800 comes with an option in the phone settings to switch on battery saver without human intervention when the battery level falls below a predetermined figure, switching certain services off such as automatic email retrieval and background applications.
• The Nokia Lumia 800 has quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support and quad-band 3G with HSPA (14.4Mbps downlink and 5.76Mbps uplink). The local connectivity is covered by Wi-Fi b/g/n with DLNA and stereo Bluetooth 2.1.
• The Internet Explorer on Widows Phone was updated to the latest version for the 7.5 update and it improves the user interface. The browser interface is quite minimalist. The URL bar is always visible.
• The new browser depends on hardware graphics acceleration to give smoother graphics (and video) as well as animation in addition to this the JavaScript engine has been retooled as well.
• Nokia Music works as a general music player but with a location-aware twist. You also get access to the Nokia Music store, which is an alternative to the Zune Marketplace. As a music player, it's pretty standard and offers pretty good sonic experience.
• Podcasts section allows you to store all of your downloaded audio and video podcasts. The music section is made up of albums, songs, playlists, genres and artists. Videos features all, television, music videos, films and personal.
• The Nokia Lumia 800 goes together with Xbox Live gaming making it even more interesting, along with Bing maps, Nokia maps and Nokia Drive that will light your path.

Disadvantages

• For the connectivity purposes, Bluetooth is limited at present therefore, there is no file transfer support, for one. However, Mango brings Wi-Fi hotspot functionality as well. All you need is an active SIM card with a data connection and you're all set.
• No Flash or Silverlight support in browser.
• Display is much dimmer than the N9's display and there is no USB mass storage (file management and sync pass only through Zune).
• Since there is no front facing camera present in the Nokia Lumia 800, you can have no video calls.
• Non-user-replaceable battery and No memory card slot (and no 64GB version like the N9)
• No native DivX/XviD support, videos have to be transcoded by Zune.

We started our review with the words by the Nokia's CEO, Stephen Elop that the Nokia Lumia 800 is the first real Windows Phone and founded on our comprehensive hardware investigation, we believe that on the basis of its performance, it is not hard to agree with it - if you can stand the somewhat smaller screen, that is. Generally speaking, The Nokia Lumia 800 is going to be more than enough for those individuals who pick up the Lumia 800 as their first Windows Phone, and both Nokia and Microsoft will be pleased to a certain extent with the first fruit of their joint venture.

As a final point, the Lumia 800 makes Windows Phone good enough to contend for former adopters' attentions. But in actual fact that is not where Nokia or Microsoft is directing - they would like customary, mid-market up graders to consider Nokia is an excellent option and for the first time in years, they are right.

On the other hand - we cannot take a look at the phone as merely a list of specifications. It is the most excellent Windows Phone device out there however there is still room for the improvement like it comes with 16GB internal memory only and lacks external memory slot. Apart from that the MicroSIM card slot of the handset, although is rather clever design yet possesses a shortcoming of having a rare size, for which you will be needed to cut your regular SIM card so that it can fit into the tray properly.

We said the similar thing with the last reap of WP devices, and whereas we are pleased to wait a little longer, we hope that we start seeing some Microsoft-filled super phones in the near future.