Nokia Lumia 800 Price, Review, Specs, cell phone reviews, Previously known as Sea Ray, the Nokia Lumia 800 is the Windows Phone flagship by Nokia. It shares the same exterior design with the Nokia N9, but with additional camera shutter button on the bottom right of the phone. It has a smaller display than the N9 to make space for the three obligatory touch buttons (Back, Start and Search) on Windows Phone platform.
The
Lumia 800 will be running on the latest Windows Phone Mango, along with some exclusive goodies such as free 25GB SkyDrive cloud storage, Nokia Drive turn-by-turn voice navigation free app and Nokia Music with Mix Radio.
The Lumia 800 is a stylish looking handset and its build quality is also first-rate. It’s a fun phone to use, thanks to Microsoft’s slick Windows Phone 7.5 software, which has excellent integration for social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter.
The Nokia Mix Radio streaming service may not be revolutionary, but the fact it’s free and has a good selection of tunes and playlists makes it a welcome addition. We also like Nokia’s Drive navigation software, especially as you can download maps to avoid incurring roaming charges when using it abroad.
Operating systemThe big difference between the
Lumia 800 and previous Nokia smart phones is that this handset runs on Microsoft Windows Phone software. Naturally, it uses the latest Mango version of the operating system, which includes a number of new features, not least of which is support for multi-tasking.
Microsoft’s previous mobile OS, Windows Mobile, was a mess. Thankfully the company went back to the drawing board and came up with a brand new interface. The results are very impressive. Once you’ve used it, it’s not difficult to see why Nokia’s head honcho decided to dump Symbian in favour of it.
DesignThe Lumia’s design will bring on a sense of déjà vu for anyone who has previously seen Nokia’s N9 handset. The body is hewn almost entirely from polycarbonate and is available in three colours: black, cyan and magenta. The two long edges are curved like the old iPod Nano and the back is gently sloped at the top and bottom.
The result is that the phone looks slightly oblong when viewed side-on. Despite the use of plastic for the body, it has a very premium and sturdy feel. Besides, Nokia says that the plastic casing helps the handset’s phone reception.
Processor, memory and speedNokia has built the phone around a 1.4GHz Qualcomm MSM8255 Snapdragon processor, which includes an Adreno 205 GPU. The OS has 512MB of RAM and 512MB of ROM to play with. There’s 16GB of memory for storing music, videos, photos and apps.
Those specs may seem tame next to the dual-core processors used in the iPhone 4S and Samsung Galaxy S2, but the Lumia still feels like a very quick handset. This may in some part be due to the lower demands that Microsoft’s OS seems to place on a phone’s hardware. Windows Phone uses hardware acceleration for its 3D menu effects, scrolling and zooming, which seems to help keep everything rollicking along at a very sprightly pace. Apps open quickly and it’s speedy when jumping between them. Pages are also quickly rendered in the browser.
The Lumia also easily outdid HTC’ s Radar in the Benchmark Free application. It scored 6.3 in the CPU integrate test versus the Radar’s 4.7 (a higher number is better). This is perhaps not surprising given that the Radar uses a slower 1GHz chip. However, in the Javascript SunSpider Test it scored a disappointing 6,915.7ms, compared to the iPhone 4S’s score of just 2,181.6ms and the Samsung Galaxy S2′s 3,445.3ms (lower is better).
Battery life and call qualityCall quality was, on the whole, very good. The ear piece delivers clean and crisp audio and is also loud enough to let you hear callers above the din of noisy bars or busy streets. The mic delivers impressive quality speech. The phone’s reception is excellent — it does a good job of holding on to a connection even in weaker signal areas.
In the past, Nokia phones have enjoyed a strong reputation for providing long battery life. Unfortunately that hasn’t transferred across to the Lumia 800. You’ll get around a day out of it before it needs a recharge, which is really no better or worse than the majority of smart phones.
ScreenThe Lumia has a 3.7-inch screen which, like all of the current Windows Phone handsets on the market, has a resolution of 480×800 pixels. That’s some way off the resolution of the iPhone’s 4S screen. The display uses AMOLED technology similar to that used on the Galaxy S2.
There are a few benefits to AMOLED displays: they’re self-illuminating so darker colours draw less power than LCD screens; they’re also capable of producing very, very dark black levels. In fact, the screen produces such dark blacks that it can be difficult to see where the display ends and the bezel begins when you’re on the WP7 homescreen.
CameraSadly Nokia hasn’t added a front-facing camera to this phone. This is a shame as both of HTC’s latest Windows Phone handsets, the Radar and Titan, have them. It means you can’t use it to make video calls and won’t be able to use the video conferencing features of Skype when Microsoft finally gets around to launching the app on Windows Phone.
We had high hopes for the main camera on the Lumia. After all, it uses Carl Zeiss Tessar optics and has an 8-megapxiel sensor. However, the camera is disappointing. It is capable of taking very good shots, but it’s much fussier about having the right conditions than the snappers in the Galaxy S2 and especially the iPhone 4S.
Nokia Lumia 800 
