Nokia Lumia 800 review: A real Windows phone

Nokia, after facing so many ups and downs in the phone market recently launched their first real Windows phone - Nokia Lumia 800. Wow! the first reaction when I saw it and that's because of its compactness, sleek fantastic design with a gorgeous 3.7 inch screen.

Despite the fact that Lumia 800 and Nokia N9 are almost identical it runs completely different software platforms while the hardware differences are noticeable but fairly minor. And besides that Lumia 800 comes with a dedicated camera shutter button which a lot of people missed in Nokia N9. However, the display remains the same 'top-notch ClearBlack AMOLED' which is simply stunning.

What else has changed? Well, the screen of Lumia 800 is little bit smaller losing 54px in height in order to make room for capacitive touchscreen control. Moreover, we had a secondary camera on Nokia N9 but Lumia 800 does not have the one and there is no access to battery because unibody shell built of polycarbonate. Although, it feels a lot more premium than normal plastic and is soft to touch.

In addition to Mango apps, Nokia Lumia 800 will come with Nokia Drive - a navigation app which supports a large number of India cities with turn-by-turn voice navigation feature and Nokia music.

Key features

• - Quad-band 3G with 14.4 Mbps HSDPA and 5.7 Mbps HSUPA support
• - 3.7" 16M-color AMOLED capacitive touchscreen of 480 x 800 pixel resolution
• - Scratch resistant Gorilla glass display with anti-glare polarizer
• - 8 megapixel autofocus camera with dual LED flash, 720p@27fps video recording and fast f/2.2 lens
• - Windows Phone 7.5 OS (Mango)
• - 1.4GHz Scorpion CPU, Adreno 205 GPU, Qualcomm MSM8255 chipset, 512MB of RAM
• - Non-painted polycarbonate unibody, curved screen
• - GPS receiver with A-GPS support and free lifetime voice-guided navigation
• - 16GB on-board storage
• - Active noise cancellation with a dedicated mic
• - Built-in accelerometer and proximity sensor
• - Standard 3.5 mm audio jack; FM Radio with RDS
• - microUSB port
• - Bluetooth v2.1 with A2DP and EDR

Pros

• - Unique yet brilliant design
• - Classy yet solid build quality
• - Excellent UI on WP 7.5 -- Live Tiles particularly
• - Very good display -- particularly for multimedia consumption
• - Contact handling much improved with Mango update
• - Battery life doesn't disappoint

Cons

• - Call clarity isn't as good as we had hoped for
• - Accessing the micro SIM slot is an unnecessarily long process
• - Disappointing camera

Conclusion

In terms of the package, Lumia 800 is the best Windows Phone on the market, but that does not mean it is the best smartphone or better than iPhone 4S. Although, it does miss out a memory card slot and front facing camera it has an inbuilt memory of 16GB and 8MP camera. At the end of the day, it has the hardware, exellent performance and a very good OS.

Written By: Tesur Rajan

Related Mobile Phones Reviews: