Here at Gadget Helpline we’re very fortunate to get the latest and great smartphones as soon as they’re available – sometimes even before they hit the shops, which leads our friends and families to inevitably bombard us with questions about the latest phones.
Asides from the usual “is it better than an iPhone?” we always hear the same one: “so what makes this phone good then?”
We’ve recently been putting the Nokia Lumia 800 through its paces, and with it being Nokia’s first Windows Phone with a heck of a buzz surrounding it, we thought we’d try to answer that popular question for you. So, what’s so good about the Nokia Lumia 800?
Simple Yet Classy Design
The Nokia Lumia 800 is crafted from a single piece of smooth polycarbonate and finished in either Black, Cyan or Magenta colours. The smooth rounded edges and corners make the phone look sleek as well as being an utter joy to hold. Three simple chrome buttons on the right side of the phone stand out and give the design a further touch of class, matching the chrome accent that surrounds the 8-Megapixel camera on the back.
A panel of smooth, yet tough Gorilla Glass covers the beautiful 3.7-inch Super AMOLED screen and runs almost to the edge of the phone, with the edges curved downwards to enhance that rounded and smooth feel. Overall Nokia’s design team has created a masterpiece with the Lumia 800.
Great Quality Snaps, Full HD Video Capture
Nokia’s expertise in the cameraphone business is well recognised the world over. As with their previous phones, the Finnish manufacturer has used the best quality camera and lens to give customers great picture and video capture quality from a smartphone. The phone features an 8-Megapixel camera with a Carl Zeiss Tessar Lens. For those of you who aren’t aware, Carl Zeiss is one of the top lens manufacturers in the world, producing lenses for high-end professional cameras, telescopes and spotting scopes, so you know this is a good quality lens.
With Windows Phone you can press and hold the camera button from the lockscreen and go straight to the camera app to quickly take snaps on the go. Tap the screen to manually set focus or hold the camera button halfway down to autofocus and you’re guaranteed a great quality, colourful and vivid photograph.
Nokia Music, Maps and Drive Software
Asides from the simple and intuitive Windows Phone 7.5 operating system, Nokia has developed some great applications which are loaded as standard on the Lumia 800. You have Nokia Maps, Nokia Drive and Nokia Music – each of which have some fantastic features.
Nokia Drive gives you a simple turn-by-turn navigation option to help you get to where you need to be. You can easily search for an address or place which integrates with Bing to find restaurants, points of interest and more nearby, and then use Nokia Drive to get you there.
Finally – and our favourite – Nokia Music gives you mp3 downloads, your own personal music library plus access to online radio stations which you can customise to your tastes. Mix Radio cleverly takes three artists you like and creates a new playlist with similar music, which you can then store offline for listening when you don’t have a data connection. Our favourite feature of Nokia Music is gigs – the app will show you upcoming gigs based on your location, with easy access to venue directions, info and even ticket vendors – fantastic!
The Latest Windows Phone 7.5 Software
Inside the gorgeous design and underneath that beautiful Super AMOLED screen lies Microsoft’s latest smartphone operating system – Windows Phone 7.5, aka Mango. Mango is the first major update to the Windows Phone operating system and packs in many new features including multitasking and great new Bing search features.
Highlights of Windows Phone include Scout – a way to easily find food, shops and points of interest around you, the Live interactive Tile interface and a smooth and Xbox LIVE integration. You can chat to your Xbox LIVE buddies and view game information right from your phone, which is very cool indeed. All of this comes packed into the best hardware we’ve seen used for Windows Phone to date.
Beautiful 3.7-inch Super AMOLED screen
Nokia has excelled in the screen department, choosing a well-sized screen of 3.7-inches. This is a little larger than the screen of an iPhone 4S, but not quite in the same league as the Galaxy S II in terms of size – we think it’s the perfect size.
The screen itself is a Super AMOLED screen, which means it’s very bright, vivid, sharp and colourful. Movies look crisp and bright games such as Angry Birds Rio really shine, with the bright blues and yellows jumping out of the screen at you.
Nokia has added a sheet of ultra-tough Gorilla Glass to protect the beautiful screen, which has a slight convex at the edges to give the phone a more rounded and sleek look. The Gorilla Glass helps to protect the screen against dust, scratches and further damage.
Let us know your thoughts on our comments below or via our @Gadget_Helpline Twitter page or Official Facebook group.
Thanks to Phones4u for providing the Nokia Lumia 800 that was featured in this article and in our video review. You can pick the phone up on contract with them now from their web store:
http://www.phones4u.co.uk/shop/shop_contract_details.asp?ItemKey=565785