Nokia Lumia 800 review

Saturday, December 24, 2011

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It will take crowds erupting in delight to silence the ring of the "burning platform" speech in the Nokia Lumia 800's ears. The speaker being Nokia CEO Stephen Elop and the burning platform Symbian.
As Nokia are starting over, the Lumia 800 would do well not to look back. It's certainly beyond the ifs and buts. A shadow still lingers though. And there are people out there - loyal Nokia users too - who would've jumped in the fire with MeeGo rather than the freezing waters of Windows Phone.


But it was for others to decide. The N9 was ordered to share its impressive unibody design with the Lumia 800. Good decision by Nokia - not saying fair - to give its WP7 pioneer a strong start. There are some Windows Phone mandated changes like the touch-sensitive Back, Menu and Search keys and a hardware shutter key.

The screen lost 0.2" and 54 pixels in height to make room for the capacitive controls. The oddly positioned secondary camera is gone as well. Still, the image quality of the screen seems unchanged - and we quite liked that AMOLED unit.


 What else has changed? Well, there's a new chipset, among other things. To make this short, here're the pros and cons of the Nokia Lumia 800.

Key features:
* Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support
* Quad-band 3G with 14.4 Mbps HSDPA and 5.7 Mbps HSUPA support
* 3.7" 16M-color AMOLED capacitive touchscreen of 480 x 800 pixel resolution
* Scratch resistant Gorilla glass display with anti-glare polarizer
* 8 megapixel autofocus camera with dual LED flash, 720p@27fps video recording and fast f/2.2 lens
* Windows Phone 7.5 OS (Mango)
* 1.4GHz Scorpion CPU, Adreno 205 GPU, Qualcomm MSM8255 chipset, 512MB of RAM
* Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n
* Non-painted polycarbonate unibody, curved screen
* GPS receiver with A-GPS support and free lifetime voice-guided navigation
* Digital compass
* 16GB on-board storage
* Active noise cancellation with a dedicated mic
* Built-in accelerometer and proximity sensor
* Standard 3.5 mm audio jack; FM Radio with RDS
* microUSB port
* Bluetooth v2.1 with A2DP and EDR
* Impressively deep and coherent SNS integration throughout the interface

Main disadvantages:
* Display is much dimmer than the N9's display
* No Flash or Silverlight support in browser
* No USB mass storage (file management and sync pass only through Zune)
* No video calls and no front-facing camera either
* Non-user-replaceable battery
* No memory card slot (and no 64GB version like the N9)
* microSIM card slot
* No native DivX/XviD support, videos have to be transcoded by Zune

A strong showing by Nokia, but it's a bit late to the Windows Phone party. They do have the design experience from being in the business longer than almost anyone else and they have Nokia Drive as their ace in the hole.

The fate of the company rests on Windows Phone Nokias being a success and much of that weight falls on the shoulders of the Lumia 800. It won't carry it alone, but it's the leader of the pack, the attention grabber.

And sure enough, it has our attention. But it's you the Nokia Lumia 800 has to wow, so sit down and let us tell you about its hardware.



 Full Phone Specification
Also known as Nokia Sea Ray
GENERAL2G NetworkGSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900
3G NetworkHSDPA 850 / 900 / 1900 / 2100 - RM-819
HSDPA 900 / 1900 / 2100 - RM-801 CV
Announced2011, October
StatusAvailable. Released 2011, November
BODYDimensions116.5 x 61.2 x 12.1 mm, 76.1 cc
Weight142 g
- Touch-sensitive controls
DISPLAYTypeAMOLED capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors
Size480 x 800 pixels, 3.7 inches (~252 ppi pixel density)
MultitouchYes
ProtectionCorning Gorilla Glass
- Nokia ClearBlack display
SOUNDAlert typesVibration; MP3, WAV ringtones
LoudspeakerYes
3.5mm jackYes
MEMORYCard slotNo
Internal16 GB storage, 512 MB RAM
DATAGPRSClass 33
EDGEClass 33
SpeedHSDPA 14.4 Mbps, HSUPA 5.76 Mbps
WLANWi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n
BluetoothYes, v2.1 with A2DP, EDR
USBYes, microUSB v2.0
CAMERAPrimary8 MP, 3264x2448 pixels, Carl Zeiss optics, autofocus, dual-LED flash,
FeaturesGeo-tagging
VideoYes, 720p@30fps, 
SecondaryNo
FEATURESOSMicrosoft Windows Phone 7.5 Mango
ChipsetQualcomm MSM8255 Snapdragon
CPU1.4 GHz Scorpion
GPUAdreno 205
SensorsAccelerometer, proximity, compass
MessagingSMS (threaded view), MMS, Email, Push Email, IM
BrowserWAP 2.0/xHTML, HTML5, RSS feeds
RadioStereo FM radio with RDS
GPSYes, with A-GPS support
JavaNo
ColorsBlack, Cyan, Magenta
- MicroSIM card support only
- SNS integration
- Active noise cancellation with dedicated mic
- MP3/WAV/eAAC+/WMA player
- MP4/H.264/H.263/WMV player
- Document viewer/editor
- Video/photo editor
- Voice memo/command/dial
- Predictive text input
BATTERYStandard battery, Li-Ion 1450 mAh (BV-5JW)
Stand-byUp to 265 h (2G) / Up to 335 h (3G)
Talk timeUp to 13 h (2G) / Up to 9 h 30 min (3G)
Music playUp to 55 h

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