Hands on with the Nokia Lumia 800

Nokia’s big comeback vehicle into the smartphone arena is their latest flagship model, the Lumia 800, a first in a new series. This is the first handset from the company to have come loaded with Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 Mango OS and they’re banking on its successes, is what it seems like. At a recent reviewers meet in Mumbai, I had the opportunity to get a closer look at the device. Here’s a quick hands-on preview of what’s coming in mid-December.

Design
The one thing Nokia has managed to stay consistent with in terms of quality, is its form factor. The Lumia 800 lives up to the hype and is truly a well-designed mobile handset. While the Android community is focusing on making handsets slimmer, Nokia seems to be focused on build quality and chic design. The polycarbonate mono body design is truly remarkable and the craftsmanship of handset with its smooth- edged and raised glass gives it elegance and definite sex appeal. It was also rather light weight, making it easy to hold and provides no hindrance whatsoever, while in your breast or hip pocket.

Well balanced and overall a great design

Nokia’s ClearBlack Display manages to enrich colors to quite an extent and keep reflections at bay. In bright lit conditions and the “great outdoors”, it makes legibility of data on the 3.7-inch screen quite high. If only they could do something about the smudges and the fingerprint issue.

Suffice to say, Nokia nailed this one with the design. What was a bit of a “put-off” was the fact that the Lumia 800 functions with a Micro SIM. A little iPhone-ish if you ask me and totally unnecessary. Switching over, obviously implies cutting your current SIM card or getting a new one and if, for whatever reason, you decide to switch to another handset, you’ll require a SIM adapter or need to change the card, once again. I say stick to a standard people!

All sides

The Lumia 800 will be out in 3 colors viz Black, Cyan, which is more like Aqua Blue and Magenta, which is more like bright pink. They’re quite funky and yet manage to maintain a sense of decorum, for lack of a better term.

Features
The base is still Windows Phone 7, which is not customizable to a large extent, so don’t expect too much from Nokia. That’s the sad part. What Nokia has done here is unveil a remarkably good looking handset with great specs, but nothing new and truly exciting in terms of customization. A couple of extra colour themes for the tiles don’t really count, nor do a few extra apps thrown in for free. What we expected to see from a company once held in the highest regard in all of mobile-dom, is something, anything, more than what you get with any other WP7 handset. It’s not like the WP7 system was laggy to begin with, but the 1.4GHz processor will ensure that the Lumia does not disappoint when it comes to speed of access for all your app or media needs.

Some preloaded apps thrown