Nokia Lumia 800

nokia lumia 800 review

Release Date:  Q3 2011
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• Sleek design
• Futuristic build quality
• One of the best Windows phones
• AMOLED Mango combo

    Nokia Lumia 800 Deals (5885)

Nokia Lumia 800 review

Differing from the official statement of Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, the Nokia Lumia 800 hardly shares any features with its successful forebear, N9. Nokia Corporation is rumoured to face a major challenge from its rivals of late and as far new-age phones are concerned, the company is lagging way behind. With all this news rounding up, the new Nokia Smartphone is burdened with extra responsibilities to re-establish the brands identity in the UK and European market. Nokia was well aware of the market demand and it took just six months for the Nokia Lumia to come into existence. The official price tag is around £399.99 with additional charges. Before you decide to go for a Nokia Lumia 800 deal, here are the specs of the smartphone that might attract you.

Hardware

The Lumia 800, though much proclaimed by Elop, does not resemble Nokia N9 nor is a ‘refinement’ of the same handset. Let’s start with the negatives of the N9, the front side camera and the LED have been removed from it. The screen has become even smaller to give space for the Windows phone buttons. In-built storage space is just 16GB compared to that 64GB storage space of the much-popular counterpart. NFC is missing and the 1GB RAM has drastically come down to only 512MB. On the other hand, many of the identical features of the n9 have been incorporated within this latest smartphone. The convex front screen fits well the frame. The light and proximity sensors are perfectly hidden behind the convex thus the front facia remains totally unruffled.

Turn the left side up and you could find that it has been carefully left blank with all the necessary buttons like volume rocker, power button, and lock button placed on the right side of the phone. All these buttons are made of metal instead of plastic. The speaker grill is at the bottom. Catch a glimpse of the top end and you could easily find the 3.5 mm jack being accompanied with a MicroUSB Port which you can push to open.

Where the looks of the Lumia 800 are concerned, you will definitely fall for it at first sight. But the design has its cons too. The flap of the MicroUSB port is easily breakable. The plastic flap can be replaced if broken. Annoyingly enough, there is no notification LED in the phone. It’s much alike Nokia’s first-generation handsets where we had to switch on the gadget to see the time, date etc. One more primitive feature of the Nokia Lumia 800 is the phone will not tell you if put on charge whether it’s being charged or not. It is pure guesswork on the user’s part. Reportedly, in some occasions, the phone did not get charged with a Micro-USB charger although it was not the USB cable which came with the new handset. But these compatibility issues are worth keeping your eye on. One more thing in contrast to HTC Windows phone, htc-titan, the Nokia-Lumia-800 has sharper corners which might be hazardous for some users.

Nokia Lumia 800- Performance and battery life

The Nokia Lumia 800 comes with a QUALCOMM MSM8255 SINGLE-CORE processor resembling its competitor, the HTC Titan except the Lumia has 1.4GHz instead of titan’s 1.5GHz. That aspect will rarely make any difference in everyday usage. Nokia Lumia 800 battery capacity is just a diminutive 1450mAh. So if you keep the phone busy for hours reading e-books, emailing, listening to music and capturing photos, the phone will need a charge by late evening. Nokia knows how important call quality and other aspects are and so the phone performed quite well during a test run using London Vodafone network. With no availability of HSPA+, the phone managed to get linked up with a 3G connection whenever available!

Display

Nokia Lumia 800 has successfully coupled Mango with AMOLED. The USP of this combo feature are the black areas of the screen are completely black, in Nokia’s own terms, ‘ClearBlack’. The feature will definitely remind Samsung users about the super AMOLED feature. The LCD panels are kept dark grey. To whatever extent the contrast is pushed up, the black colour will remain the same resulting in a superb outdoor display performance. Photos on this smartphone are all fine except a dimness affecting the text. If you love reading e-books, then the Nokia Lumia 800 is a must have for you.

Camera

The eight-megapixel camera that this handset offers is much alike the n9 and their supporting hardware are in a class of their own. The f/2.2 lens is built by Carl Zeiss, a much-craved-for feature in this Nokia smartphone. You can follow either of two steps to take a snap. You can press down the two-stage camera button to adjust focus and exposure or else you can just tap the screen and the phone itself will make the arrangements to take a great snap. The later one is amazingly fast. It also provides the users with exposure compensation, white balance, saturation, focus mode and resolution. You can adjust all of these with the help of the ‘cog’ button. Video files of 720p come in at 80-100MB/minute which makes it a better option than Droid Razr, Htc Titan and many more rivals. Lumia’s autofocus occasionally goes slow while recording a video. Panning of camcorder also affects the video quality to a great extent. It is lacking the Panorama and Burst Shot features of the Htc Titan.

Software

The OS is fast enough and the visual design is all fine for ease of use. The navigation system is not stuffed with a lot of options and you will probably miss a USB Mass Storage if you have used it before. The Windows Phone keyboard is quite easy to use and handles basic functions effectively. For social networking, music recognition, search, maps, cloud storage, folder syncing and other daily activities. You do not need to install apps as the in-built ones will work fine for you. As far inbuilt apps are concerned, you must know about three of these which are really amazing. Nokia Drive will work as a GPS for you and it covers 90 countries and works with maps offline as well. The wide-span coverage capability coupled with voice instructions has put Google and TomTom far behind. An App Discovery Tool named App Highlights will suggest the most popular apps available for you to download.

The Mix Radio of the Nokia Lumia 800 is a nice radio player where you can find categories and genres well-defined. The audio quality is just fine for the music lovers.

In a nutshell, Nokia Lumia 800 is a highly efficient smartphone that comes with Windows OS. Beautifully crafted and easy enough to use, the phone lives up to the expectation of many Nokia phone lovers.

UPDATE - Checkout the new Nokia Lumia 900