The Nokia Lumia 800 Hands ON

The Nokia Lumia 800 is beautiful! The shiny curved glass and smooth unibody polycarbonate material match well. It’s the same design as the Nokia N9 and that’s not a bad thing. The size of the glass covers almost the whole front side of the Nokia Lumia 800 and seamlessly joins the rest of the phone. It plays a trick on your eyes that makes it difficult to see the actual edge of the 3.7″ Clearblack AMOLED display. There’s even a sensor under the top right corner that is only visible at certain angles. Don’t let the display’s beauty fool you. It’s made of the ultra strong Gorilla Glass.

The Nokia Lumia 800 feels very natural in the hand. I can easily wrap one hand around the device. HTC and Samsung offers devices with larger screens, but these phones are overall larger, too. I find bigger phones more difficult to use with one hand, but others may not find that a problem. For comparison, the Nokia Lumia 800 is thinner but slightly taller and wider than the popular Nokia N8.

The Nokia Lumia 800 has four physical buttons: volume up, volume down, power, and the camera button. You might want to check if these buttons are loose. Some reviewers have reported a lot of movement when rubbing these buttons. Luckily, my review unit doesn’t have that issue.

On top of the Nokia Lumia 800 are the 3.5mm audio jack, microUSB and microSIM slots. The microUSB slot has a door that needs to be open whenever you need to charge. You can then use your nail to slide the compartment for the microSIM. You’ll need to get a microSIM cutter to make your old SIM card fit in the Nokia Lumia 800. Some carriers sell microSIMs at their stores if you don’t want to cut it yourself. For example, I was able to go in and out of a T-Mobile store within 5 minutes for a microSIM.

The loudspeaker is located at the bottom. I don’t see any other holes for the microphone, so I’m going to assume it’s somewhere here, too.

The back has the 8 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss lens and dual LED flash. We’ll talk about the camera options and image quality later in this review.

The keyboard on the Nokia Lumia 800 is amazing! Seriously. It is! I can tap on it really fast and the keyboard somehow knows what buttons I meant to press instead of the ones next to it. If you need more help, predicted words appear above the keyboard. iPhone users will feel right at home, too. They’re pretty similar.

Email is great on the Nokia Lumia 800. Setup is so easy. If you’re a Gmail user like me, just enter your Google account and password, then all your contacts, calendar, and email get synced! Multiple email accounts are supported as well. To keep things neat, there’s an option to  link the inboxes  so you can view all your emails from multiple accounts in one inbox. To view emails separately, just go to the folders and select the account you want to view. The user interface is great, too. The subject on new mails are colored, while email threads are indented. Shortcut tip: tap the left side of an email to reveal checkboxes and select multiple emails.

The browser on the Nokia Lumia 800 loads most websites quickly, but I noticed a few problems. Some sites don’t render well. One example is the touch-friendly version of Facebook. That’s a huge problem for Facebook addicts like me. It’s also a hit or miss with embedded Youtube videos. Some will play fine, but some pages show error messages that Flash is unsupported. Another website that doesn’t render is Mashable. The websites that do render work great with pinch-to-zoom. I don’t know the technical reasons behind this, but I think it has something to do with HTML5. The HTML5 Test website gives the Nokia Lumia 800 Windows Phone browser a score of 141. That’s lower than 177 for Android, 272 for the MeeGo browser on the Nokia N9, and 296 for the iOS browser iPhone 4. Let us know if you have a better explanation for these issues.

Bing. Most of us use Google to search the web, but Bing is surprisingly good on Windows Phone. In addition to normal search, there are four options at the bottom of the app that are fun to use. There’s location, music recognition, product scanner, and voice search. The scanner is my favorite. It requires no action from you. Just place a barcode or books in front of your phone, then it will automatically search for the product. You can see more info about the scanned product and check its prices.

Nokia Drive and Maps. To differentiate from other Windows Phone devices, Nokia offers Nokia Drive and Nokia Maps. Other manufacturers will get Nokia Maps, but Drive will be exclusive to Nokia devices. Maps is currently in beta and the two aren’t closely integrated yet. For example, if I search on Nokia Maps, I don’t have the option to use Nokia Drive to navigate to the place. At their current state, Drive and Maps are snappy. We haven’t experienced slowdowns or lags when zooming or panning through the maps. GPS locks are quick too. The Nokia Lumia 800 finds my location within seconds.

The voice navigation on Nokia Drive does not tell you the street names when turning, but we were told this feature will be added in an update. Not bad for a free service!