The good :
The Nokia Lumia 800 has a singular design, a stunning display, and a nice driving console in Nokia Drive.
This smartphone’s killer feature is not Siri, nor Ice Cream Sandwich, but rather gadget-as-piece-of-architecture. Curved on the sides, flat on the top and bottom and suitably thin yet solid, its only buttons are, from top-to-bottom on the right side, a volume control rocker, a lock screen and a camera launcher. Its only visible hole is a headphone jack up top: The charger and SIM slot are hidden beneath two flimsy latches that are more of a pain to open than they should be. The screen gently slopes outward toward the holder — imagine, if you can, a boy holding a cafeteria tray under his shirt — but stays relatively free of smudges. The tiles on Windows Phone Mango look great cascading up and down the Lumia’s Hall-of-Mirrors-ish curved display; more Windows Phones should use this curving glass as it is so well-suited to the style and movement of Mango. The front of the Lumia is a giant piece of Corning Gorilla Glass. There are three capacitive buttons beneath the 3.7-inch PenTile screen that buzz slightly when you touch them.
As with all smartphones, the Lumia 800 has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS, and lets you send e-mail, and text and multimedia messages. A new “Mango” feature present in the latest Windows Phone OS lets you seamlessly switch between text and instant messaging, if the contact is signed on to Facebook or Windows Live Messenger.
The People hub holds contacts you can import from Facebook, Twitter, Google, and more, and it’s virtually limitless as long as you’ve got the space. Mango lets you link together e-mail inboxes into a super inbox if that’s your cup of tea.
In terms of apps, there are the Windows Phone basics like alarms, a calculator, a calendar, Internet Explorer 9 (which supports HTML5, but not Flash), and Bing Maps for turn-by-turn voice navigation in addition to walking directions (there are no directions for public transit). There’s Marketplace for getting more apps, plus the Music & Video apps, which contains podcast subscriptions, a playlist generator called Smart DJ, and integration with Zune. The Carl Zeiss Tessar 8-megapixel camera is another addition to the list.
The bad :
Lumia lacks a front facing camera for video chatting. The camera the Lumia does have is decent at best. Lumia’s camera shoots 720p, while most new smartphones coming out today are shooting 1080p video. All problems seem to revolve around the camera for Nokia. Nokia and Microsoft are so close, but not quite there. The phone is late to the game. Windows Phone still lacks the app diversity (quality, not quantity) of competing platforms.
Looks like Nokia and Microsoft fall a wee bit back in the huge list of competitors yet again !
