Nokia Lumia 800 review

When Nokia CEO Stephen Elop uttered those infamous words “we are standing on a burning platform”, the future looked pretty bleak for the company. A leviathan that once dominated the industry had fallen behind its main rivals, and was in danger of becoming an also-ran in the smartphone race.

Nokia’s answer was to unceremoniously dump Symbian and replace it with Microsoft’s Windows Phone. Now, nine months after that landmark speech, we finally have the first of its new generation.

Nokia’s hopes rest on the Lumia 800; the big question is, can it combine the company’s traditional mobile phone manufacturing strengths with Microsoft’s slick, yet immature OS?

Physical design

Initially, it seems the answer to that question is yes, at least as far as build quality and design is concerned.

The Lumia is a real beauty, but not in the traditional sense. Surprisingly, Nokia has decided to build it, not from aluminium, but a solid chunk of polycarbonate plastic. You might think this would make it feel cheap – in the way the Samsung Galaxy S II does; in fact, by using techniques borrowed from the world of aluminium case design, Nokia has achieved a very high quality of finish.

Thus, all the detailing has been machined, instead of moulded: the combined speaker and microphone grille on the bottom edge, the chrome-rimmed 3.5mm headphone socket on the top edge, and the seamless chrome inset surrounding the camera lens on the rear.

The chassis itself is one piece, and it’s uncompromisingly rigid. Any attempt on our part to get it to flex was stubbornly resisted.

And anyone resistant to the idea of sheathing their pride and joy in a cheap protective case will rejoice at the scuff-resistance of the Lumia’s body – with colour running all the way through the plastic (even the brightly-coloured blue and hot pink versions), and Gorilla Glass on the front it should still look smart at the end of your contract, even without the kid-glove treatment.

It isn’t perfect, though. We’re not entirely convinced by the shape: the rounded edges fit snugly into the palm, and it’s a very grippy phone, but we’re not keen on those sharp corners – they have a tendency to dig in after a while, especially during gameplay. And the tiny pop-up door covering the micro-USB port is extremely flimsy.

Software

Aside from those minor points, though, the Lumia 800 is lovely, and its new operating system offers plenty to get excited about. And aside from the new “Mango” version of Microsoft’s mobile operating system, there are a couple of extras, unique to Nokia handsets.

First up is Nokia Drive, which sees the company’s free satnav app ported across to Windows Phone. Given the paucity of satnav products for Windows Phone so far, this is a boon, and all the better for its downloadable, locally stored maps. That gives it a big advantage over Google Maps on Android handsets, which let you cache small areas, but not whole countries, and on the iPhone, which comes with no free satnav solution as standard.

Nokia is also making a big thing of the Lumia’s Nokia Music app, and in particular the “Mix Radio” feature. This is a Last.fm-alike – a series of themed streaming, semi-interactive radio stations, maintained by Nokia staff in Bristol. There isn’t much control over the content, aside from the ability to skip tracks that disagree with you, but service is free and if you come across tracks you like you can download them directly from the Nokia MP3 store.

Elsewhere, the Mango update offers plenty of useful improvements. There’s broader and deeper support for social networks out of the box. Twitter and LinkedIn support is now baked in, and there are more Facebook features than before, including integrated calendar support, video upload and Facebook chat. The latter is of particular interest, and is integrated in the messaging view with SMS texts and Microsoft IM, allowing you to converse with the same person across multiple services on the same screen.

Other upgrades include Local Scout, offering location-sensitive web content, highlighting restaurants, events and things to do. There’s also a voice search facility, Shazam-alike music recognition built in (Bing Audio) and a translation tool (Bing Vision), which allows you to snap foreign lingo and have it turned into English.

The Marketplace search allows you to filter results to apps alone – very useful – and there’s a host of email and office-based improvements, too, including the ability to link inboxes together and view them on one screen, threaded conversations, a to-do list and Office 365 support.

The apps in the Marketplace aren’t yet a rival for Android or iOS, and prices remain on the high side, but on this evidence Windows Phone looks to be maturing into a smartphone OS of real substance.

Camera and screen

So far so good, and Nokia manages to draw on its experience to supply good quality elsewhere, with the Lumia’s 8-megapixel shooter next on the tick list.

Its Carl Zeiss Tessar lens ensures pictures are sharp, clear and largely free of chromatic aberrations, and a wide maximum aperture of f2.2 means low-light shots aren’t spoiled too badly by noise.

Macro shots exhibit exceedingly sharp focus, and the dual-LED flash works well, too, illuminating close-up subjects sympathetically. All good so far, but again there’s a little disappointment in store. The videos this phone produces look fine, but they’re limited to 720p – a step behind other manufacturers’ flagship handsets. There’s also no image stabilisation.

The screen, meanwhile, is very good. It measures 3.7in across, boasts a resolution of 480 x 800 and it’s AMOLED, so colours are extremely vivid, and blacks extremely black, which suits the stark lines of Microsoft’s OS perfectly. Brightness is up there with the Samsung Galaxy S II (measured with a colorimeter, it topped out at 296cd/m2), and black measured at a perfect 0cd/m2, again right up there with the Galaxy.

Where it falls behind slightly is in its use of the slightly older PenTile matrix sub-pixel array, in which sub-pixels of some colours appear more frequently than others.

The result is a very slightly grainy look. Edges of text characters, for instance, aren’t quite as crisp as they would be on the Samsung Galaxy S II or iPhone 4S. These phones use an OLED screen with a standard RGB sub-pixel array in which the primary colour sub-pixels appear with equal frequency.

Performance and battery life

We’ve yet to be disappointed with the responsiveness of any Windows Phone handset and the Lumia 800 continues that trend. Under the hood there’s a 1.4GHz, single-core processor backed by 512MB of RAM and 16GB of storage. Windows Phone 7.5 flies along as a result.

Applications written to take advantage of Mango’s new and improved multitasking support fire up a lot more quickly than previously, and the new task-switching view works as well as you’d expect. Simply hold down the touch back “button” and a list of recent applications pops up, ready for you to scroll through. You can’t terminate apps from here, however, which seems an oversight.

Less impressive is browser speed. Windows Phone’s new Internet Explorer 9 mobile supposedly shares much of its code with its desktop counterpart, and that includes hardware acceleration and the ‘Chakra’ JavaScript engine. But, while panning and zooming operations are smooth, it still lags behind the opposition in key areas.

In the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, for example, the Lumia 800 finished with a score of 6,793ms – three times slower than the dual-core iPhone 4S – and loading the BBC homepage over a fast Wi-Fi connection took a lumbering ten seconds.

That’s also disappointing, when most other smartphones complete the test in five seconds or under.

Perhaps most disappointing of all, however, is battery life. Nokia’s Symbian S60-based handsets have an enviable record here, with past phones retaining an impressive 70% charge after 24 hours of testing. In the same test, the Lumia 800 retained a mere 30% of its charge.

That’s one notch behind the iPhone 4S, which achieved 40%, two notches behind the Samsung Galaxy S II, and way behind the sort of standard we’ve come to expect from Nokia over the years.

Verdict

There’s no getting past the fact, then, that the Lumia 800 is no match for the best of the Android set or even the iPhone 4S. It isn’t quite the performance beast we were expecting, nor is the screen up there with the very best, and we’re disappointed at the lack of 1080p video. Battery life, meanwhile, is a disappointment.

There’s still plenty to admire. It’s a beautiful thing to behold, has a great camera for stills, and the preinstalled software is extremely slick, with worthy additions from Nokia. We doubt it will win over those hankering after the days when Nokia ruled the roost, but it’s a start, and a pretty good one at that.

Details
Cheapest price on contract	Free
Contract monthly charge	£26.00
Contract period	24 months
Contract provider	www.buymobiles.net
Battery Life
Talk time, quoted	13hrs
Standby, quoted	14 days
Physical
Dimensions	61 x 12 x 116.5mm (WDH)
Weight	142g
Touchscreen	yes
Primary keyboard	On-screen
Core Specifications
RAM capacity	512MB
Camera megapixel rating	8.0mp
Front-facing camera?	no
Video capture?	yes
Display
Screen size	3.7in
Resolution	480 x 800
Landscape mode?	yes
Other wireless standards
Bluetooth support	yes
Integrated GPS	yes
Software
OS family	Other