The Design Of The Lumia 800

The Lumia 800, like the Meego-based Nokia N9 it's modeled on, is one interesting-looking phone. Worked from a solid piece of colored polycarbonate (a specific type of plastic), the smooth magenta, cyan, or black Lumia 800 reminds me of a fat stick of chewing gum (I reviewed it in black). It has a tabletop head and tail and rounded sides. The material, whose properties include resisting heat damage and denting, feels solid and durable in the hand, if a little bit slippery. It measures 4.59 inches tall by 2.4 inches wide by 0.47 inch thick. Thanks, in part, to its uniform shape, the handset doesn't take up too much room in closer-fitting pockets.

On the right spine you'll find the slim metal volume rocker, the power button, and the camera shutter button. A push-in door covers the Micro-USB charging port. Once you open that, you can slide out the Micro-SIM card holder, but this combo is an inelegant, unintuitive action that requires some patience until you get used to it. There's also a 3.5mm headset jack up top.

The back is home to the 8-megapixel camera lens with dual-LED flash. There's no battery cover on the back of this phone, so prepare to press and hold the power button to perform a hard reset should things go wrong (just like on iOS devices) instead of a battery pull, should things go wrong.

Let's move on to one of my favorite parts of this phone: the screen. For starters, it's fitted into the Lumia's body to form a pretty tight seal. The screen material itself is curved and slightly bubbles out (about 2.5mm), which gives you a smooth, almost spherical feel as you swipe left and right across the screen. (It actually feels pretty awesome.)

Also awesome is the look of the screen itself. Its WVGA resolution (800x480 pixels) on 3.7 inches of AMOLED material just pops. It doesn't hurt that Nokia has applied its ClearBlack display, a polarizing filter that helps improve visibility in direct sunlight, and indeed, it did as promised. Unfortunately, direct sunlight also makes finger smears stand out. With Gorilla Glass incorporated into the final product, you're looking at a smooth, vibrant, and touchable screen that shows off black blacks and saturated color. The screen size could be larger overall, but some people will prefer the more petite size. Navigation is just fine with Windows Phone's relatively larger live tiles, but composing e-mail messages and reading content online is easier with a 4-inch screen.