The Nokia Lumia 800 is a well built and handsome handset with a solid set of features. However, its combination of mediocre specs and mostly standard implementation of Windows Phone certainly doesn’t catapult it above the competition.
It’s definitely one of the better Windows Phones, and the Nokia exclusives like Nokia Drive and Mix Radio have the potential to be great features. The Nokia Lumia 800 is the premium model in the range of two, and it looks exactly the same as the N9, the ill-fated loan Meego handset that will never reach our shores. Despite this pedigree, it’s a very nice handset when it comes to style and build.
The Lumia 800 will be very familiar to those of you who saw the Nokia N9. The body curves round at the sides to give it a squashed oblong shape, when viewed from the top. The screen is curved too, taking up the whole of the device.
The shape is very similar to the shape of Apple’s fifth-generation iPod nano, so if you like the look of that little chap you’ll probably have a soft spot for the 800. It’s machined from a single piece of polycarbonate which makes it feel particularly sturdy and will hopefully put up with a rough life much better than cheaper phones bolted together from numerous bits of plastic.
At 116mm long and 61mm wide, it’s not so big that it won’t fit in your hand, and with a thickness of 12mm, it shouldn’t bulge out your jacket pocket too much. That is slightly thicker than the current crop of sub-10mm Android phones, however, with the new Samsung Galaxy Nexus and Motorola Razr approaching 7mm thick in places.
The screen is good quality, though. It’s an AMOLED panel with a resolution of 480 x 800 pixels and it really pops! Colours are really bright while the lack of a backlight means blacks are truly black. Viewing angles are also essentially infinite. It’s not going to rival the incredible high-res screens of the new Samsung models but it’s a solid, competent display.
The high quality 8MP camera with dual LED flash and Carl Zeiss optics certainly lives up to its reputation on the new phone, with photos looking sharp and crisp on the OLED screen. Bright, vibrant images were caught in challenging light conditions ranging from gloomy alcoves to harsh fluorescent lighting.
The Windows Phone 7 handset’s dedicated camera capture button is solid and fluid in use with the metallic finish offsetting the polycarbonate casing well for a stylish, high-end aesthetic.
At the heart of the Nokia Lumia 800 is a 1.4Ghz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, which is a single core chip. This lack of a dual-core chip isn’t immediately apparent when flicking around most of the interface, with the slick animations of Windows Phone rendered with aplomb.
However, several more demanding apps did seem to slow it down, causing pauses of several seconds. In fact, Nokia’s own additions seemed to be the worst at this. Nokia has been talking up the fact it will have unique extras that really bring Windows Phone to life – Stephen Elop, Nokia CEO, even said that the 800 will be the first ‘real Windows Phone’ – but on the evidence we saw, we’re not so sure.
The Lumia 800 may look like the N9, but it’s worlds apart on the inside. The 800 is running Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system, instead of the N9′s MeeGo.
The interface of Windows Phone is made up various colourful tiles on your homescreen that display live information about the weather, the news, and your contacts — the contacts screen also pulls in information from various social networks so all your friend’s details are in one place. The latest version of the OS — named Mango — brings proper multitasking so you can have numerous apps running at once.
You also get integration with your Xbox Live account so you can play all kinds of games and have all your hard-earned achievements sync to your Live account on your Xbox 360. As more and more phones use the software — and if the apps on your phone can also be used on a desktop PC with Windows 8, as has been rumoured — then it’s likely that more developers will take up Microsoft’s cause. For the moment though, the app store is nowhere near as well-stocked as the stores offered by iOS or Android.
The Lumia 800 also offers a full turn-by-turn GPS navigation service which is great news if you regularly find yourself hopelessly lost as you drive around the Birmingham one-way system. At the launch event, Nokia proudly boasted that the Lumia 800 will be the only Windows Phone device that offers this service.
Otherwise, the Nokia 800 looks and feels like a fairly typical Windows Phone. So it’s slick to use and most of the smartphone feature boxes are ticked with good email and messaging support, and easy web browsing experience (no Flash, though, and an improving app store. The overall hardware is also very nice.
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