You might hear it said that Nokia is
on a knife-edge, and that this old king of mobiles will live or die based on
the success of its latest flagship phone. We love melodrama as much as the next
guy, but such talk is overplaying it. Sure, the great manufacturer has its troubles,
and yes, the Lumia 800 bears a heavy burden of responsibility on its 3.7-inch
shoulders. However, now that Nokia's CEO Stephen Elop has set his company on a new
path, there will no doubt be a slew of new products -- both hardware and
software -- over the next few years. In fact, the Lumia 800 was probably rushed
to market,
having been designed and built within the space of six months and
intended as a placeholder for greater things to come. Nokia simply grabbed the
overall design of its orphaned N9 handset, threw it together with Windows Phone
Mango and then whatever the Finnish is for baddaboom, baddabing. So,
does the Lumia feel rushed? Or is this the first stirring of something
special? Read on and we'll tell you what we think.It's hard to contemplate the overall beauty of this device without getting emotional, and we already blubbered enough in our N9 review. Nevertheless, this design is not without its failings, and some of those make us want to cry too. Most importantly, the plastic flap over the microUSB port is too fragile. We managed to bend it trying to close it will the drawer was still slightly open -- and we didn't jam on it hard, mind you. Exactly the same thing happened with our N9, so it's no freak accident. If you buy this device, please be careful -- the flap is replaceable, luckily, but we envisage a long queue for spares.
The absence of a notification LED is annoying. The N9 had a faint 'always on' clock and notification area on the screen, but that's gone here. Aside from the fact that you have to switch the device on to see any notifications, there's another drawback: if the device is totally discharged, it doesn't even have enough energy to tell you whether it's charging when you plug it in. At that point it's pure guesswork as to when or if your device will be ready to use again.
We had a couple of random power-related incidents. The phone once died suddenly in the middle of a call and flashed the battery warning, but then it switched itself back on and revealed that the battery was still at 52 percent. On another occasion, the phone initially refused to charge with an official Nokia micro-USB charger -- albeit not the one that came in the package. Both issues were short-lived, but we're keeping an eye on the behavior of our review sample and will update if anything new arises.
One more thing: the sharp corners and relatively thick 12.1mm (0.48-inch) profile might not suit everyone's pocket. If we look at HTC's rival Windows Phone, the Titan, it has rounded corners and a mere 9.9mm waistline, so it manages to pack a 4.7-inch display without feeling much chunkier than the Lumia 800. As we said in our full review, the aluminum also has extremely high build quality, albeit with a completely different design.
Performance
and battery life
The Lumia 800 packs a Qualcomm MSM8255 single-core processor -- exactly the same System-on-Chip that powers the Titan, except that Nokia has decided to clock the Lumia slightly slower at 1.4GHz instead of 1.5GHz. Does this make a difference? Not really. In everyday use, we sometimes experienced minor lags when opening up Nokia Drive or Nokia Music, and occasional judders when using a processor-intensive app like Local Scout, but the Titan was no better.
We
don't expect to see any Lumia-owning geeks on the performance leaderboards.
Surprisingly, though, the benchmarks gave the Titan a clearer lead than we might have predicted. WPBench gave the Lumia 800 an overall score of around 86, versus the Titan's 96. Part of this difference was in proportion to the slower CPU clock speed, but a bigger cause of the disparity was actually the Lumia 800's tardiness in shifting large chunks of data between its memory and storage. Likewise, the Sun Spider Javascript benchmark gave the Lumia 800 a score of 7200ms for surfing on the Web Kit browser, versus 6,500ms for the Titan. Overall, we don't think there's anything to be too concerned about here, but we don't expect to see any Lumia-owning geeks on the performance leaderboards.
The battery is only 1450mAh, compared to the Titan's 1750mAh behemoth. However,
the Lumia's smaller and more power efficient display cancels out this disparity
and the two phones end up being roughly on a par. With heavy use, with a fair
amount of photography, e-book reading and so on, the 800 will probably die by
late evening. With more normal use, involving calls, push email and a bit of
music, it could stretch to a day and a half. In the WPBench battery test, the
phone lasted two hours and 40 minutes -- against three hours from the Titan.
Nokia knows how to build phones, so reception and call quality were both reliably average when using the Vodafone network in and around London. There's no HSPA+, but the phone was quick to establish a 3G or HSDPA connection when available. Importantly though, the Lumia doesn't do internet tethering, whether by WiFi or cable, whereas the Titan does.
Display
Mango, say "hello" to AMOLED. The Lumia might not be the first to make this happy pairing, but it's a powerful union here nonetheless -- and if you've never used an AMOLED phone before, then you're in for a big treat.
The key selling point is that any black areas on the screen are completely black. Deep, true, outer space black. Nokia has its own name for this effect -- ClearBlack -- but it's really just the same end result as Samsung's Super AMOLED technology, which is not a bad thing.
In comparison, LCD panels are just a very dark grey. What's more, when you bump up the brightness on an LCD, you can take a hit on contrast, because that background grey gets steadily lighter. But with AMOLED, the blacks remain implacably perfect no matter how high you push the brightness -- producing a level of contrast on the Lumia 800 that can make your eyes throb if you deliberately mess with the settings while indoors.
In practice, AMOLED gives the Lumia's display much better outdoors performance. The brightness pierces through smudges and reflections on the glass, while also delivering powerful color saturation. We wouldn't want use it for reading e-books in direct sunlight -- we've got e-ink for that -- but the bold live tiles of Windows Phone seem tailor-made for the Lumia 800's display and we'd certainly choose it over LCD for everyday use in the fresh air.
Nokia is going way beyond the call of duty in providing its own apps, which already help to distinguish the Lumia 800 from the competition and will certainly become more of a selling point over time -- particularly when Nokia's Pulse social networking platform emerges from beta testing. In the meantime, Nokia's proprietary offering amounts to three key apps.
First and foremost, Nokia Drive turns your handset into a fully featured sat nav, based on the Navteq platform that covers 90 countries and also works with offline maps. Need to get from A to B in Mozambique? Then download the 15MB file and off you go. The coverage puts Google Maps and TomTom to shame. You get full voice instructions too.
Nokia Music adds to the stock player by giving you access to Mix Radio. This is a neat little radio player with eclectically titled categories (e.g., "Golden Era Hip-hop"), which let you narrow down your genre while still leaving it open enough for some unexpected tunes -- so long as you have WiFi access or a cheap cell data plan. The audio quality is on a par with the free version of Spotify, for example, so it won't satisfy audiophiles, but it's fine for listening on the go or plugging into a small dock.
Finally, Nokia also supplies an app discovery tool called App Highlights, which suggests essential apps like Kindle, eBay and AccuWeather as well as promoting others you might not be aware of. It also has a little gimmick where you shake your phone to be shown a surprise app -- completely pointless, but it emphasizes the underlying purpose, which is simply to encourage to savor the generally high-quality offerings cherry-picked from the Windows Phone Marketplace.
Wrap-up
Nokia's Lumia 800 is a sophisticated and capable smartphone that melds its hardware beautifully with the Windows Phone OS. Whether it's the best phone for you right now depends on certain factors.
First, you need to establish whether you're a Windows Phone type of person. If you're thrilled by dual-core processors, extremely high-res screens, large camera sensors, customizable widgets, expandable storage, USB mass storage and other such features, then you'll be better off with Android or -- to a slightly lesser extent -- iOS, because that cutting-edge stuff is currently absent on Redmond's OS. On the other other hand, if you want to be part of a carefully crafted, simple and generally happy emerging ecosystem, then look no further.
The next question is whether you'd choose the Lumia 800 over another Windows Phone, such as the Titan. The Titan's camera is slightly better, but not enough to be a deciding factor. Conversely, the Lumia 800's design is arguably superior, but not massively so. Instead, it's the display that's the more important issue. If you want a bright and colorful screen for media and general use, and you're not too fussed about the PenTile pixel issue (which you ought to see for yourself before buying), then the Lumia 800's AMOLED display wins hands-down. However, if you prefer a bigger screen that does a better job of displaying text, then go with the Titan.
Some people will notice that Nokia is building a special relationship with Microsoft, to the point where the manufacturer is able to deliver more exclusive features in its phones and push for things to be added in later revisions. If you're a WP fan, then there might be an argument for committing to Nokia in order to benefit from all those good things to come. However, we think that's premature. Drive is a nice exclusive feature, but there's not much else yet. If anything, the Lumia 800's hardware risks being left behind as Nokia develops apps and platforms based on NFC, front-facing cameras and other (unknown) features that are likely being prepared for Windows 8 Apollo. The Nokia-Microsoft relationship will certainly become more important, but that's not enough to sway a purchasing decision today.
