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TechJunkeez Gear | February 2012
It has always been the same story throughout man’s history.
Whenever something or someone gained too much power, someone, somewhere, was
plotting their downfall. Nokia experienced this cruel sequence of history
firsthand. Still, it looks like this old, rugged dog can learn new tricks.
They’ve finally accepted the defeat of their Symbian OS and moved on with a
Microsoft deal to use the Windows Phone 7 OS. The Lumia 800 is the first child
of this affair.
Certainly
looks the part
Nokia’s problem never was the build quality or design of their products. It was
always the weak processing power and the ancient Symbian OS. With both of those
obstructions shattered, the Lumia 800, on paper, should be a flawless phone.
This might very well be Nokia’s resurrection; and it should be.
Nokia have gone to great lengths to achieve the highest build quality possible,
making the detail and care given to each device’s creation almost unheard of.
The whole body is made out of one piece of smooth polycarbonate plastic. Since
there are no two plastics to snap onto each other, this creates the barrier of
inserting the hardware into the device. The manufacturing process can be
imagined as building a ship in a bottle. Even the curved glass screen was fit
into the body in such a seamless manner to produce zero tolerance between the
two surfaces. The 97 holes of the speaker grille were individually drilled,
because they were too small to form during the injection molding process. I
could go on, but you got the point.
Nokia
spent a lot of time and effort on this device, and it's easy to notice
It all shows as well. The moment you hold the device in your hand, it
immediately gives you a slap on the face for thinking it’s a Samsung or an
Ericsson. The Lumia 800 is quintessentially Nokia.
The Windows Phone 7 OS
This is by far the most underrated operating system on the planet. After seeing
how clean, pure and original WP7 looks; it’s hard to think of Android or iOS as
having “intuitive” UIs.
Nokia are hailing the Lumia 800 as the first true WP7 phone and it’s hard not to
agree. The simplistic design of the Lumia 800 can’t help looking like WP7’s
soulmate. Everything swipes and slides in a seamless fashion, without ever
coming across any sort of lag. The “Live Tiles” homepage of the OS is a breath
of fresh air from the usual widgets and grids of apps. For those of you who
aren’t familiar with WP7, Live Tiles is basically two columns of big coloured
boxes (tiles), which are shortcuts to applications. And yup, you guessed it,
they’re live, meaning they update on the fly and show you notifications about
emails, calls and such, straight up on their respective boxes.
The Windows Phone 7 OS easily has the most good
looking UI
Nokia have also added a few applications of their own onto the OS. Most
interesting of which are the Nokia Drive and Nokia Maps apps. The first offers
accurate turn-by-turn navigation for 95 countries for free. To avoid any service
or roaming charges, you can also download the maps to the Lumia’s mass storage
for offline usage.
We’re probably not going to dine with Roman soldiers, or defend ourselves from
the Persian Empire anytime soon. But I hope history goes easy on Nokia and gives
them back their crown. I had a soft side for the good old days, when N-series
phones were the best phones on the market, period. The Lumia is certainly fit
for the job of lifting the company up again. It’s even adequate, Lumia means
light. Get it? Nokia’s Lumia? Sigh, nevermind, it’s Friday.
Quick Specs
OS: Windows Phone 7.5 Mango
CPU: 1.4GHz Scorpion
Camera: 8MP, 720p video capture
Screen: 3.7” AMOLED
Resolution: 480x800px
Talk Time: 11 Hours
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