Nokia Lumia 800 Has Some High-end Specifications

You may recognise the NokiaLumia 800's chassis design from the Nokia N9 . Indeed, the Lumia 800 will come in the same black, cyan and magenta colours as the N9. There has been a screen size reduction though (from 3.9in. on the N9 to 3.7in. on the Lumia 800), making the Windows Phone handset easier to grip and use one-handed.

There are three narrow silver buttons on the right edge for volume, power on/off and camera control. There's no front-facing camera, but the back has an 8-megapixel camera with a dual LED flash. This sports Carl Zeiss optics, and is one of the Nokia 'signature' features that helps to differentiate the Lumia 800 from the Windows Phone competition.

The top edge has two covered connectors, and you can't open the right-hand one without first opening the one on the left. Nokia must realise this is a design fault, as new devices have stickers on the covers explaining that you first have to push a raised pimple on the left-hand cover to reveal a Micro-USB connector. Only then can you slide the right-hand cover to pull out the micro-SIM caddy. Admittedly you're unlikely to need to access the micro-SIM that often, but the design is a little obtuse nonetheless.
The headset jack is on the top, at the far left. The left edge is clear, while the bottom edge has a speaker grille.

The screen measures 3.7in. across the diagonal and has a resolution of 480 by 800 pixels. The resolution is a standard Windows Phone feature and you won't find other handsets deviating from it — although screen sizes do vary.

Nokia has chosen AMOLED technology for the screen and the result is a sharp and bright display that looks particularly good with a dark background. Windows Phone offers just dark (black) and light (white) background choices, while Nokia has added its own 'Nokia Blue' accent colour range. This is very close to the blue that comes as standard with Windows Phone, so there's little room for true personalisation as far as look and feel is concerned.

Features
The Lumia 800 has some high-end specifications. The processor is single core, but it's a cutting-edge 1.4GHz Qualcomm MSM8255. Wi-Fi (802.11b/g/n), Bluetooth (2.1+EDR), HSPA (14.4Mbps down, 5.76Mbps up) and GPS are all supported. It's a quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE phone.
There is 512MB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage — and no microSD card slot for adding more, as Windows Phone does not support external storage. That means all external data has to reach the handset over the air or via a wired connection.

Zune caters for wired synchronisation of music, videos, podcasts, photos and other media, while contacts and calendar data need to come over the air via services like Microsoft Exchange or Windows Live. Windows Live users get 25GB of online storage (called SkyDrive), which can be used to store automatically synchronised photos and Excel, PowerPoint, Word and OneNote data. Anyone looking for wired synchronisation of calendar and contacts — as they used to get with Windows Mobile — will be disappointed.

When Microsoft launched Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) it claimed 500 software updates and changes. Notable enhancements include speech recognition for text creation and web searching, custom ringtones, contact groups, native Twitter and LinkedIn support, Local Scout (via Bing) for finding nearby venues, picture tagging and Office 365 support.

However, there's no change to either the basic ethos of how the OS functions or its look and feel.
The Start Screen user interface is still based around 'tiles' that sit in a vertically scrolling array. Some can carry live data, and you can 'pin' things like map locations to the Start screen for easy access. Once you're beyond the Start Screen, horizontal scrolling is the order of the day, with data and services often accessed via a series of connected screens.

The ethos of Windows Phone is based around users and actions rather than applications. To take just one example, tapping the People tile on the Start Screen takes you individual contacts and their social media streams, to a contact log, and to a series of communications-based services that bring together social media feeds, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Outlook (Exchange and Office 365), Windows Live and Google.

To contact someone you don't have to run an app, you just choose them from the contacts list and then select the action required. If they are on Facebook then you're offered the option to write on their wall. If not, the option isn't offered.

If you need to use your smartphone for productive work, we're pleased to report that text entry is fast and easy. The soft keyboard is responsive and surprisingly efficient to use, even in portrait mode.

The integration of Microsoft Office components — OneNote, Excel, PowerPoint and Word, plus support for Office 365 and SharePoint — are all advantages for professional users. Synchronising with our own SkyDrive worked perfectly. The first time we went into the Office area of the Lumia 800 it found documents we'd synchronised to SkyDrive with another Windows Phone, and we were able to continue working on them without a hitch.

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!