Nokia, once a force to be reckoned with in the phone market, has now been relegated to the sidelines of both the budget and the high end devices. With the majority of would-be Symbian buyers heading to iOS and Android, Nokia abandoned its home grown Symbian and MeeGo operating systems and locked a special agreement with Microsoft, plugging in Windows Phone into Nokia’s high end smartphone platform. So does the Nokia Lumia 800, the first fruit of Microsoft-Nokia shotgun marriage have what is takes to revive Nokia’s flagging fortunes and shake up the smartphone industry?
We definitely think so, given that this smartphone is not only stylish but also packed with both productivity and entertainment features, delivers solid performance and has excellent social media integration. With absolutely no buttons up front just like Nokia N9, this stunning piece of industrial design comes in 3 vivid colors (cyan, magenta and black) and offers excellent build quality. The curvy unibody polycarbonate chassis and Gorilla Glass with smooth, beveled edges give a huge boost to the Lumia 800′s attractiveness. Thanks to Microsoft’s slick Windows Phone 7.5 software, Lumia 800 offers the best social and Internet performance, with one-touch social network access, easy grouping of contacts, integrated communication threads and Internet Explorer 9.
Sporting a 3.7 inch AMOLED ClearBlack curved display (with resolution of 480×800 pixels) blending seamlessly into the reduced body design, the screen displays razor sharp picture and rich colors. Under the hood, you will find 1.4GHz Qualcomm MSM8255 Snapdragon processor, which includes hardware acceleration and dedicated Adreno 205 graphics processor. The OS has 512MB of RAM and 512MB of ROM to play with. There’s 16GB of internal memory for storing music, videos, photos and apps and extra 25GB of Microsoft’s free SkyDrive online storage but is no microSD memory card slot.
Lumia 800 also features a 8 megapixel camera with an f/2.2 Carl Zeiss Tessar lens and dual-LED flash, and support for 720p HD video capture. On the downside, there isn’t a front-facing camera for video chats. As for connectivity, there’s the usual WiFi b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR and A-GPS, plus a bevy of sensors: accelerometer, proximity and digital compass, though no gyroscope. Lumia 800 seems like have a lot of potential, but at the end of the day pricing will be critical. We have been informed it will cost around $585 which puts competing head to head with Galaxy S II, HTC Sensation and soon to be launched Samsung Galaxy Nexus.