After a year of hard work, Nokia has finally unveiled its first smartphone with Windows Phone 7.5, the Nokia Lumia 800.
From all the leaks and rumours surfacing prior to Nokia’s announcement today at Nokia World, we knew that several Windows Phones would be making an appearance. The first is one we’ve seen many times before, under the name of Sea Ray, or the Nokia 800.
Officially dubbed the Lumia 800 (Lumia means ‘light’, say Nokia), the phone bears a striking resemblance to the Nokia N9 MeeGo smartphone. The casing is a seamless, unibody which is soft to the touch and machined out of polycarbonate. It has a matte finish in the colour of cyan, so it sticks out in a crowd, while also not attracting greasy fingerprints. The phone will also be available in matte black and pink.
As we had anticipated earlier in the year, the Lumia 800 will use micro SIM technology, something that Nokia hopes will help them to lure iPhone 4, iPhone 4S and iPad owners to the new phone.
Nokia’s Lumia 800 has some impressive specifications to boot, starting with the large 3.7-inch Super AMOLED screen on the front. Beneath the screen are the three familiar Windows Phone keys, which are touch operated.
Inside, the phone has a 1.4GHz Snapdragon processor which is backed up by 512MB of RAM. Storage is 16GB onboard, and because of the partnership with Microsoft, users will get an additional 25GB of cloud storage via Microsoft’s SkyDrive service.
Nokia has ensured the camera is tip-top too, with an 8-Megapixel snapper featuring Carl Zeiss optics featuring on the back of the phone. The camera can record video in HD quality at 720p, has an aperture of f 2.4 and also has a new face tagging feature. Unfortunately there is no front-facing camera, which could bring disappointment when Microsoft introduces Skype integration into Windows Phone Mango in the near future.
Nokia hasn’t played around much with the stock version of the Windows Phone 7.5 operating system, though it has focussed on three key areas and added some useful software of its own. Nokia Drive is pre-installed and completely free, giving you voice guided turn-by-turn satellite navigation. Nokia says the Lumia 800 will be the first Windows Phone to feature free voice guided satnav software out of the box.
Also pre-installed is a new service called Nokia Music, which combines with another service, called Mix Radio to bring tunes to your phone without the need to connect it to a PC and copy files, which we all know can be a painstaking task.
The Nokia Lumia 800 will go on sale in the UK next month, costing £442.80 SIM-Free from Clove Technology, or free on £31 per month contracts from Orange and Vodafone.
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