Our review of the Nokia Lumia 800

It used to be that Nokia ruled the Smartphone market. While I played with and was fluent with Palm OS, UIQ, Blackberry OS, Pocket PC phone and MS Smartphone, for years S60 was my smartphone os of choice. Of course, a lot has changed since then; Palm OS died and was transmogrified into WebOS, which is now on life support. Blackberry OS has hit rough waters and is due for a replacement. Microsoft’s Smartphone OSes became Windows Phone. Nokia transition of S60 to a touch-screen interface was a disaster. They intended to replace S60 with Maemo, which was later renamed Meego. The transition to Meego was delayed and eventually Nokia decided to place their bets on Windows Phone.

It’s kind of ironic that Nokia and Microsoft are now in bed together since S60 and Windows Mobile competed against each other for years. It would be like if Apple started putting Android on their phones.
The Lumia 800 and 710 and the firsts fruits of this relationship.



If the Lumia 800 looks familiar to you that’s because it looks almost exactly the same as the Nokia N9. They’re the exact same size and shape and all the physical buttons are identical. Inside they’re quite different. While they both have Super AMOLED displays, the 800’s measures 3.7” while the N9’s is 3.9”. Other differences are 16GB of built in storage vs 16, 32 or 64GB on the N9. 1Ghz TI OMAP processor on the N9 vs a 1.4Ghz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. The 800 has the 3 Windows Phone menu buttons plus it lacks the N9’s front-facing camera. I also 800 is a darker shade of black.

Like the N9 the 800 has a polycarbonate unibody, so the main body has no seams. It’s a lot smaller than many top-of-the-line Android devices and I must say, it really fits nicely in my hand. The finish is quite smooth though sometimes I find it kind of slippery



Polycarbonate is actually what they use to make plastic eyewear. While it should be good at withstanding impacts, I found that it shows scratches and scuffs rather easily. The piece of chrome in the middle of the back scratches really easily too.



Anyways, I actually prefer the 800’s polycarbonate unibody to the N8’s aluminum unibody because the entire body sans the screen and camera, are the same material with no seams. The N8’s body was nice but I was always a little disappointed that the ends were plastic.

Another benefit to a polycarbonate body is that radio waves pass through it very easily. I’ll test this when I get my hands on an 800 that’s banded for North America.



Included in the box is form fitting case. It fits pretty tightly.



If you change your SIM card reguarly I don’t recommend you use it because I could see it getting stretched if you removed it too many times.



Nokia touts the Lumia 800 as the first ‘real’ Windows Phone. While I have my doubts that the design of Lumia 800 was specifically meant for Windows Phone (just look at the N9) there’s no denying that WP looks fantastic on the 800.



The micro USB connector is hidden behind a door. you press on it and it opens up. You have to open the USB cover to remove the SIM card tray. It’s very cool - kind of like a puzzle. Still, I question how durable it is. I can imagine my toddler breaking it if she found the 800 charging on my desk.

The display appears to be a 3.7” super AMOLED display. Super AMOLED display are arranged in a pentile matrix which usually results in a screen which looks kind of ‘dotty’. While the Lumia 800 has a pentile matrix, I don’t usually notice it because the pixel density of the 800’s display is pretty high so the dottiness isn’t really noticeable.



One of advantages of a super AMOLED is that the display has extremely deep black levels. If you choose a black background, The Windows Phone live tiles really pop out because you can’t really tell where the bezel stops and where the screen starts. Speaking of tiles, the 800 has an extra ‘nokia blue’ colour that other Windows Phones don’t have. It looks awesome on the 800.



The camera has a 8mp sensor along with a LED flash. The lens has a wide aperture of f/2.2 and a relatively wide focal length of 28mm (35mm equivalent).



While the Lumia 800 can take good pictures, out of the box it over-saturates pictures. Every picture has a red or a blue tinge to it. Lowering the default saturation and contrast levels doesn’t fix this completely but it does help a lot. The auto focus is a little tricky too. The shutter button can be half pressed to focus. If you fully press it, it takes a picture immediately whether it’s in focus or not. This isn’t a terrible thing but I’d rather have the option for it to focus continuously like it does on the iPhone. If you have a still subject, you can tap to focus and capture.



Something else to point out that isn’t as big a deal is that the shot-to-shot times aren’t as fast as you’ll find on the iPhone 4s or Blackberry Bold 9900 - it’s now slow per-se but it’s something I noticed.



Overall, the camera isn’t as good as the iPhone 4s’ but it’s still decent.



I love how there’s a dedicated camera button. I take a lot of pictures and it’s a feature I miss on a lot of other phones like the iPhone 4s.

Video is recorded at 720p, which is a little disappointing, since there are many phones that can record at 1080p. Video quality is okay but I had a few issues. When I use it indoors a lot of the time it refuses to focus on my subject. There’s no ‘touch to focus’ feature so sometimes I have to relaunch the camera.

If you have problems with the 800 forgetting your settings remember that you have to choose to save your settings if you want it to remember them after you exit the app.

Now when you compare Android and iOS, the topic of fragmentation inevitably comes up. In order to differentiate their products from other manufacturers, Android OEM’s add their own user interface. This causes 3 problems: First off their interfaces can sometimes slow Android down which generally isn’t the fastest OS to begin with. Secondly, it can delay OEM’s from bringing out newer versions of Android since they have to spend time and money customizing it before they release it to customers. Thirdly is the issue of fragmentation. Just because a program works on one Android phone is no guarantee that it will work on another.

In order to combat this problem, Microsoft is extremely strict with Windows Phone OEMs. OEMs are not allowed to customize the WP user interface and they’re pretty limited when it come to what kind of SoC (processors) they can stick in their phones. It’s one of the reasons why the Lumia 800 only has triband HSPA support instead of penta-band like most of their newer S60 phones.

The benefit to this is that Windows Phone runs really smoothly, it’s not like Android where many phones essentially have 2 sets of user interfaces. The other benefit is that almost everybody gets their updates at around the same time. The downside for me as a reviewer is that outside of the design there isn’t much to differentiate between Windows Phone from different manufacturers. The Lumia 800 is almost exactly like my HTC Surround 7, it’s just faster.

As I already mentioned the UI and base applications are all identical to other Windows Phone running Mango (that would be all Windows Phones). The home screen is organized into tiles. You can adjust the colour of the tiles plus you can choose a white or black background.

If you swipe the home screen it will bring up a list of all the programs. You can add programs to the home screen by pressing and holding them and then choosing ‘pin to start’.

The Windows Phone interface is both minimalistic and elegant. You take the programs you use most and pin them to the home screen. If you’re an Android user there are no widgets on WP. Instead of the notification area you get on both Android and iOS WP shows notifications on the lock screen.

Some tiles are live, meaning that they change. For example: the tile for email has a number on it depending on how many new emails you’ve received since you last read them. Another example is the HowardForums app which shows how many new PM’s you’ve got.

The phone itself is organized into hubs. The people hub is where your address book is located. It also shows updates from your Facebook and Twitter accounts. There’s a ‘me’ tile which you can use to check in, update your social networking status, see if anyone mentioned you in their social networking, etc.

The pictures hub shows you new pictures from your Facebook, Twitter and Windows Live (but not Flickr, Picasa, etc) as well as photos that you’ve taken.

There’s also XBOX LIVE (where you play games), Marketplace (where you download new apps), Bing maps as well as Bing search which has a built in QR code scanner and a voice search.

You can create, view and edit MS Office files - One Note, Excel, Word and PowerPoint. The Office only syncs up with SkyDrive (Microsoft’s free, cloud-based storage), Office 365 and SharePoint servers.

The Music Hub is where you listen and watch music, radio and podcasts and videos as well as access other music-related apps which you’ve downloaded. Like other Windows Phones you can use Zune Pass (also available in Canada) to download as many songs as you want for a flat rate. You can listen to them as long as you pay the monthly fee.

All the stuff I just mentioned comes with ANY Windows Phone.

Nokia has included a couple of their own programs which are only available for Nokia Windows Phones: Nokia Drive, Nokia Maps, Nokia Music, Contacts Transfer, App Highlights and We Care. At the Lumia 800 launch last year Nokia mentioned Nokia Mix Radio - that feature isn’t available in Canada so I didn’t try it.

Nokia Drive is a Navigation program while Nokia Maps is strictly for mapping. Nokia Drive works well. It has a very clean interface, voice guided navigation, the voice sounds pretty natural, day and night modes and 2D and 3D views. The best thing about Nokia Drive is that it allows you to choose what maps you want to download to the device. So instead of downloading new new maps when you’re roaming you can grab them when you’re at home using WiFi. Maps are split into province or state - there are maps from all over the world. Just to give you an idea the map for the entire US is 1.8 GB, Canada is 288MB while Ontario is 86MB and California is is 140MB.

We care is just a disclaimer reminding you that Nokia collects information about your phone and how your use Nokia products to provide you with more relevant content and that they don’t share this data with third parties without your consent. It’s pretty standard stuff.

I don't really get the point of Nokia Music, it’s just another music player. To load music on your device you have to use the Zune desktop. There is a ‘gigs’ feature which shows you local up-coming concerts and performances.

App Highlights is mostly a front end for the Marketplace where you can download apps.

The HSPA radio in the Lumia only supports 1900 Mhz and as such I’m going to wait till I get a North American one to test the RF performance.

I haven’t really tested any of the other current crop of Windows Phone devices like the HTC Titan, Samsung Focus S, etc so I’m only comparing the Lumia 800 with last year’s HTC Surround 7.

SunSpider is a javascript benchmark which runs on pretty much any browser. This makes it platform agnostic so we can compare different browsers across different operating systems. It’s important to note that SunSpider is hosted at webkit.org so it’s intented for webkit browsers. Webkit browsers include the default browsers for iOS, Android, Blackberry OS 6+, Blackberry Playbook, WebOS (RIP) and also powers Chrome, Safari, etc.

Samsung Galaxy Nexus 1951.3
Apple iPhone 4s 2252.1
Blackberry Bold 9900 2681.6
Nokia Lumia 800 6727.4
HTC Surround 7 9694.8

Windows Phones use a browser powered by Internet Explorer. So you’re probably thinking that the Lumia 800 has a much slower browser. Yes and no. It scores terribly in SunSpider but so do all other Windows Phone. In real life I find that the 800’s browser is just as fast if not faster than the iPhone 4s’ in side-by-side comparisons (I didn’t compare side-by-side with the Galaxy Nexus). So, while I don’t thin SunSpider is useful for comparing Windows Phone with other platforms it is useful for comparing different WP’s with each other.

Check it out, the 800’s processor is clocked 40% faster than the Surround 7’s and its SunSpider score is approx 40% higher.

To test the battery life I used a 7hr long 720x400 video file.The video is of the HowardForums logo and a bunch of text with transitions on a white background. I used the Zune desktop to copy the file to the 800 which transcoded the file to a more Windows Phone friendly format first. I charged the battery to 100%, turned on airplane mode, turned the screen to maximum brightness and played the video until the battery died.

Nokia Lumia 800 145
Motorola RAZR 242
Samsung Galaxy Nexus 222
HTC Amaze 4G 288
HTC Raider 303
LG Optimus LTE 242

I’d blame the Lumia 800’s extremely poor showing here on a) its 1450mAh battery being a little undersized and b) maybe its Super AMOLED display uses a lot of power when displaying white.

I’d also guess that Windows Phone uses more power than other OS when playing back video.

Anyways, I'm going to run my test a few more times to see if I can record a better result.

There is a bit of background hiss but otherwise voices sound fine. I did notice that the earpiece’s sweet spot is sometimes hard to find. Outgoing is a little harsh sounding. Maximum earpiece volume is adequate. And the speakerphone volume isn’t very loud.



The Lumia 800 is the first Windows Phone powered Nokia that I’ve had the chance to review. Am I happy with it? Kinda. Hardware-wise, this phone is solid but then again so are a lot of other phones. The design is interesting, unique and very Nokia. It’s fast, easy to use and has a great display. It’s also very easy to hold, unlike a lot of Android phones which are getting too big.

At the same time the software isn’t very Nokia. It’s a good and bad thing since S60 was getting really long-in-the-tooth. The problem is that software-wise, it just feels like any other Windows Phone device. Unless you absolutely must be able to download maps for free on your device, there’s nothing to differentiate this phone from a HTC, LG or Samsung windows Phones. It’s good if your a fan of Windows Phone, not as good if your a Nokia fan.

Likes:
The display looks fantastic and really flatters the Windows Phone UI
solid
interesting body (unless you already own a N9)
good sound quality

Dislikes:
slippery
camera colour is off
no front facing camera
only 720p video

Interestingly:
Nokia bet the farm on Windows Phone