The Nokia Lumia 800 will go down in history as one of the most important Nokia devices ever. The first product of the controversial Nokia – Microsoft partnership, the Lumia 800 unabashedly symbolizes the new Nokia, a maker of smartphones running Windows Phone 7. I considered the Nokia N9 the last real Nokia flagship smartphone; the Lumia 800 is the newest Nokia flagship outside the USA and in this review I’m going to tell you all about it.
In terms of hardware design, there is nothing surprising about the Lumia 800 because it shares its entire aesthetic with the N9. The only changes Nokia made to the Lumia involve the inclusion of a two-stage camera shutter button, the addition of 3 capacitive buttons for Back, Home and Search required by Windows Phone, a 3.7-inch WVGA AMOLED Clear Black display with a Pentile subpixel arrangement (instead of a 3.9-inch panel) and (curiously) the placement of the LED flash on the back has changed. I wouldn’t consider this a bad thing, because I still think what Nokia has managed to create with the N9 (and now the Lumia 800) is, without a shred of doubt, the best-looking smartphone I’ve ever seen. The Lumia 800 feels exactly the same as the N9 in the hand and that’s a positive too – the fact that the device is constructed entirely out of plastic doesn’t even matter because the matte finish is lovely and the device is incredibly solid and terrifically well-built. But you knew all that already.
The downsides of the N9′s hardware, though, carry over to the Lumia 800. The microUSB port cover is still as unnecessary as it has ever been, and still looks and feels like it might break if you bent it the wrong way. The loudspeaker is still too quiet for my tastes. That’s not to say the Lumia 800 doesn’t have hardware flaws of its own. Because of the mainly black Metro UI of Windows Phone 7 and abundant use of small and thin fonts, the device is rather hard to use outdoors in the sunshine because of how difficult it is to make out text and tiny buttons on the display. I felt that the capacitive buttons were placed a tad too close to the edge of the display; I often accidentally hit on of them when I was in fact trying to tap on a (really small) toolbar button. The Lumia 800, being a Windows Phone, is limited to a maximum of 12.2GB of usable storage which might not be enough for some with no higher-capacity option unlike the N9. A front-facing camera is omitted from the Lumia 800, which is rather inexcusable today. What’s even more inexcusable, though, is the lack of a notification LED – it’s something I’ve really missed from my Android phone because it’s important, in my opinion, to be able to see at a glance, without even pressing any buttons, whether there are any outstanding notifications. It’s also interesting to note that everyone I handed the Lumia 800 to couldn’t find the power button. but they loved how it felt in the hand and the extremely smooth user interface, which I’ll talk about in greater detail below.
It’s no secret that I hated the Pentile display on the N9. That single aspect of the device spoiled the entire experience for me. Text and icons suffered from obvious pink and green artifacts and looked grainy and fuzzy as a result, there was a painfully obvious checkerboard effect and obvious green and pink fringing on the left and right edges of the display. The Lumia 800 also happens to have a Pentile display, so are things any better now? Yes and no. The artifacts around text and icons is gone, but small fonts can still look grainy, the checkerboard effect remains visible especially when web browsing, and the edge fringing is still present. The Metro UI conceals the checkerboard effect most of the time so the Pentile effects honestly won’t bother you most of the time, but there will be occasions where you’ll notice it and realize that Pentile displays are an abomination. Period.
The camera on the Lumia 800 is actually the exact same unit found on the N9 – it’s an 8 megapixel autofocus camera with Carl Zeiss optics and a dual-LED flash. It sounds impressive on paper, and it did perform rather well on the N9, but it fails to impress on the Lumia 800 and it’s probably the software’s fault. It struggles to cope with large areas of light and dark in the same frame, creating shots that are either under- or over-exposed. In complex macro shots, the results can often turn out relatively soft and disappointing. And at night or in low light, the Lumia 800 is completely useless. It’s really not a very good showing from a phone manufacturer famous for doing smartphones with awesome imaging capabilities, but you can check out my sample shots here.
What makes the Lumia 800 interesting to me, though, isn’t the hardware at all. I mean, there’s nothing new about the Lumia 800′s exterior if you’ve seen, touched or used a N9. What motivated me to get this device in for review (apart from it being a shiny new Nokia phone, of course) is the smartphone platform it runs on – Windows Phone 7.5 Mango. I’ve been a Windows Phone skeptic ever since Microsoft unveiled it to the world but I’ve never actually used one for any substantial period of time. So to find out whether my skepticism can be justified, I decided to give this fledgling smartphone OS a chance to impress me. In fact, I unboxed the Lumia 800 determined not to heap loads of hate onto Windows Phone just because it works differently from what I’m used to. After all, I was (and still am) aware that Windows Phone is meant for a very different target group as compared to Android. I was also conscious not to assume that how I use a smartphone is exactly how everyone else uses a smartphone, and to keep the man on the street in mind. Because I can say right from the outset that if you’re any sort of a geek or tech enthusiast, you probably won’t like Windows Phone very much.
The biggest thing that strikes me about Windows Phone is how enjoyable it is to use. It’s not something that can really be measured, but it’s entirely possible to like Windows Phone just because you feel happy using it. I haven’t seen such a fluid and snappy touch response this side of the iPhone; Windows Phone is just so slick and smooth it’s almost impossible to find any stuttering, lag or annoying slowdowns. I really love how consistent and clean Metro UI is, and how you simply won’t experience anything else like it. Microsoft has managed to create a user interface that’s fresh and unique and for once, it does work. Never once in my usage of the Lumia 800 did I discover anything to take issue with about the aesthetics of Metro UI. It’s futuristic, cool, tasteful and never overwhelming – a strong contrast to the likes of iOS whose UI is loaded with dollops of gloss, swathes of linen and overwrought leather stitching. Another thing that’s really refreshing about Windows Phone is how little clutter there is out of the box, and how third party apps look just as beautiful and consistent as the built-in ones. It’s exactly this level of consistency that Android continues to lack and I do agree that consistency in how apps look and work is important in creating a good user experience. To sum things up, in terms of UI/UX Windows Phone is simply brilliant.
Of course, my positive views on Windows Phone don’t start and end with the Metro UI. Windows Phone is extremely easy to set up and configure to one’s liking right out of the box – I was up and running with all my online accounts synced up within minutes. The virtual keyboard works very well on Windows Phone – even though there’s very little to customize about it, there’s no option for haptic feedback that I could find and I wish I could turn the autocorrect up a bit, typing on the Lumia 800 is a virtually painless experience even when on the move. The keys are really well-sized and adequately spaced, and I was able to achieve a decent speed without really having to spend a long time getting used to the keyboard. I think the People Hub is really well thought out in terms of how effectively it brings contacts and social networking together so that individual contacts become a lot more detailed; the information displayed about each contact becomes a lot more than just a name and a number. Moreover, the People Hub makes it possible to grab a feed of what individual contacts have posted on Facebook and Twitter and browse through the photos they have posted on Facebook. In fact, it’s even possible to post on an individual contact’s Facebook wall as a way to communicate with a person from the People Hub. If you’re a big Facebook user I think you’ll really appreciate the level of Facebook integration present on Windows Phone – it’s literally baked right into the platform. Competing efforts like Sony (Ericsson)’s Facebook inside Xperia aren’t anywhere near as slick so kudos to Microsoft where it’s deserved. On a related note, the Messaging app integrates Facebook Chat and Windows Live Messenger completely seamlessly alongside SMS and MMS, negating the need for a separate IM client for some people.
There are a few more bright spots in my experience with Windows Phone. I absolutely love how the Zune app looks, and how smooth and quick it feels when trawling through albums and tracks. There’s even gapless playback! As long as you don’t use any cloud-based music streaming solution, you’ll be delighted with Zune simply because it presents your music in an extremely attractive fashion. After all, in this day and age there’s really not much to a music player on a smartphone; what’s important is how it looks and whether it works well and I think Zune on Windows Phone, despite the questionable name and bad reputation, really fits the bill. Also, I really haven’t found a better Foursquare app on any platform than 4th and Mayor, which unquestionably provides the best Foursquare experience currently available. But I have to be brutally honest and say that things do go downhill rather dramatically from here.
Where should we begin? Well, let’s start with the status bar in Windows Phone. I cannot even begin to describe how much of a hatefest I’ve been having with this basic UI element that Microsoft somehow managed to screw up so badly. The whole point of having a status bar is to provide at-a-glance, essential information about what’s going on with your phone. And on Windows Phone, the status bar completely fails to serve even such a basic role.
What the hell were they thinking? Most of the time, only the clock shows up on the display. That’s right – you can see nothing other than what time it is in the status bar. To see, for instance, how much battery life is remaining, or the signal strength, or whether the phone is connected to 2G or 3G, or whether WiFi or Bluetooth is switched on, you need to tap on the region of the status bar (i.e. at the very top of the display) or swipe down from the top bezel. I’ve been so irritated by this lousy, form-over-function, utterly useless status bar because even to do something as basic and simple as check how much battery is left, I need to tap or swipe the top of the display. Every. Single. Freaking. Time. It’s bearable for the first two hours but then the tapping/swiping gets old very quickly and you start wondering what the hell the person who did the status bar on Windows Phone was thinking. After a day of tapping/swiping repeatedly just to check whether you remembered to turn off the WiFi to conserve battery, you wish the person who thought this was a good idea could be somehow struck by a bolt of lightning. There’s no setting available to have all the status icons remain on the display at all times, a casualty of Microsoft not allowing much customization on Windows Phone at all. And so you’re resigned to tapping, and swiping, and tapping again many times each day just to have a set of little icons slide in like pretty thingalings and then infuriatingly disappear again.
To add insult to injury, in certain apps like Twitter for Windows Phone and Microsoft’s own Marketplace client, it is completely and totally impossible to access the status bar. Even the clock is nowhere to be found. So first, you need to tap the display just to see a bunch of basic, monochrome icons that should be there in the first place fill the status bar, and second the status bar isn’t even available all the time. So in some places you can’t even see at a glance what the time is. I can’t even keep an eye on the battery meter when using the phone. The status bar, in itself a painfully basic element of any smartphone user interface, is simply broken in Windows Phone. It has clearly been designed with form over function in mind, and it just doesn’t work.
Guess what else doesn’t work in Windows Phone? Multitasking. Why the hell do I have to wait for the initial sync in Evernote to complete before doing anything else with the device? No, I’m completely serious here – if Evernote is doing its first sync and you switch back to the homescreen, the app quits entirely and the sync fails. Why is it that in 2012 I still have to leave Nokia Drive in the foreground so that it can finish downloading my chosen map and voice? Yes, on a modern, futuristic smartphone platform, Nokia Drive can’t do background downloads. And that spiffy-looking app switcher? It doesn’t actually show apps that are running in the background, it shows a preview of all the apps that will return to the foreground if you constantly press the Back button. Worse still, apps launch slowly (virtually every app I’ve tried has a useless colourful splash screen of some sort), apps resume slowly (there’s actually a loading indicator that comes up when you try to resume an app) and it is only possible to resume apps through the app switcher; trying to resume an app by tapping on its live tile or going into the app list will instead relaunch the app. The fact that multitasking is so lacking means that Last.fm scrobblers don’t really work, so I’ve been unable to have the music I listen to on the Lumia 800 show up on my Last.fm profile. Why is this system so painfully stupid?
Now, we all know that on platforms like Android, Google does place a great emphasis on baking its own cloud services (such as Google Search, Gmail and Google Maps) deep into the system, emphasizing them over competitors’ services and making them a selling point (there’s no better Gmail experience available on any smartphone platform other than Android, for instance). It’s worked brilliantly for Google – people do buy Android phones simply because of the tip-top integration with the Google services they use and it’s part of what makes the platform appealing for consumers. So even though Google Search is pretty much your only option on Android when it comes to search (unless you install third-party search apps), it’s alright because the vast majority of people use Google Search and appreciate its presence on their Android device.
Microsoft has taken the same approach with Windows Phone that has worked so well on Android – from the get-go, you’re invited to enter your Windows Live account credentials, which then allows you to use Windows Live Messenger, Hotmail and download apps from the Marketplace. Skydrive is very well-integrated as well, despite the fact that the vast majority of people who use cloud storage use Dropbox and will likely not migrate over to Microsoft’s clunkier, Windows-only solution just because of their Windows Phone. That seems pretty bad, already, until you meet Bing.
Now, if you’re Google and you make Google Search and the rest of your cloud services the default, if not the only, option available out of the box on Android, no one will have any complaints because people love these services and have already been using them. But if you’re Microsoft and the vast majority of people couldn’t care less about Windows Live or Bing, forcing people to use these services isn’t going to increase the appeal of Windows Phone in any way. I hate Bing. I hate being forced for no good reason to use a different search engine from what I’m used to. When nobody apart from those who don’t know any better (is there even anyone who actually prefers Bing over Google Search assuming knowledge and experience with the two?) and rabid Microsoft fanboys likes your online services (or is even aware of their existence), making them the only option on your smartphone platform can backfire. I, personally, am so annoyed with Microsoft’s insistence that I use Bing (seriously, each time I hit the goddamned Search button or try to do a search from Internet Explorer I’m forced to use Bing) that I don’t see myself actually buying a Windows Phone. I’m not saying Microsoft shouldn’t have Bing as the default search engine, I’m saying give me a freaking choice in the settings as to how I want to search from my smartphone. I see Bing as a downside, not an advantage on Windows Phone and placing a Live Tile for Google Search right at the very top of my homescreen doesn’t entirely make up for it.
Speaking of Live Tiles, I’m not so sure I really like them either. They are meant to serve three purposes – display glanceable information (just like widgets), display notifications and act as app shortcuts. Yet, they don’t play any of those roles really well. As widgets, most of them don’t really display much information at all simply because very few apps actually have tiles that are ‘live’ in any way. A good example is the tile for the Zune app; it would be a no-brainer for its Live Tile to at least display album art when a track is playing but it remains completely static. As for the Live Tiles that are actually live, most of them don’t even provide much information – the Calendar tile, for example, is really quite large but doesn’t show anything else other than the next upcoming entry. That’s 1 appointment at a time displayed in the Live Tile. A notable exception is the Accuweather Live Tile, that displays a graphic of current weather conditions accompanied by high/low temperatures and the current location. In terms of serving notifications, Live Tiles are rather weak as well – virtually all notifications displayed in Live Tiles take the form of a single number, with the exception of the Me tile. Receive a new text? The Messaging tile displays a ’1′ beside the app icon. I question how useful that really is, especially when platforms like Android and iOS actually allow you to not only glance at who the text is from. but also get a short preview of what the text actually says. That’s substantially more information that the single number that Windows Phone provides. Here’s a concrete example of how the lack of information in notifications on Windows Phone is an issue: when I receive a spam text on my Android phone, I can instantly see who it is from through the notification dropdown and choose to ignore it and clear the notification. But on Windows Phone, time is wasted because I’d have to hit up the Messaging app, realize that the text isn’t anything I want to pay any attention to, open it anyway to clear the notification, and then go back to the Start screen again. So these Live Tiles aren’t very good at being widgets, and they sure aren’t really that competent at being notifications. And as app shortcuts, they’re simply absolutely and unnecessarily huge. The entire Live Tile homescreen doesn’t really scale well either – once you have more than, say, 16 tiles it starts to feel extremely inefficient and overloaded, particularly since it’s impossible to insert separators between groups of tiles.
One unique selling point of Windows Phone is the amount of social integration that’s evident throughout the platform, but most notably within the People Hub. As I discussed above, I really like how deeply Facebook is integrated into the platform. I do have a gripe about the various What’s New feeds scattered around in the Hubs – they don’t automatically update at all, only doing so when you actually scroll to them. So if I don’t look at the What’s New feed in the People’s Hub for a couple of days, I’d be left staring at news from 2 days ago while waiting for the feed to update itself. But this doesn’t seem so bad when you realize how lousy the Twitter integration is.
It almost seems as if the Twitter integration was designed by someone who doesn’t actually use Twitter. The Notifications pane in the Me hub only auto-updates every 30 minutes or thereabouts, making it completely useless. So if I have a conversation on Twitter that naturally involves a whole bunch of mentions, they don’t show up on Windows Phone until some time later when they all flood in at once and I see something stupid like ’17 new items’ on the Me tile, and have to jump into the notifications pane to clear them. Despite Twitter integration being present in Windows Phone, installing the free Twitter for Android on my Android phone that lacks any integration whatsoever provides a far better Twitter experience. How hard can it be to implement push notifications, especially for a social network like Twitter that’s so immediate in nature? And even the notifications themselves, when they actually show up, aren’t very useful because they only tell you that so-and-so mentioned you in a tweet without actually displaying what the person said unless tapped on. It’s just impossible to use Twitter on Windows Phone without having a full-blown app installed, which negates the point of having it integrated into the platform. Even basic Twitter features like direct messages aren’t even supported. Twitter integration honestly feels like a complete rush job and because pretty much all the free Twitter apps on Windows Phone are rubbish (Twitter for Windows Phone being the worst offender here), you’d have to buy an app like Rowi to enjoy a decent Twitter experience on Windows Phone. Here’s the issue with that: the normal user sees that it’s possible to grab a great Twitter app for free on iOS and Android but not on Windows Phone and that doesn’t put Windows Phone in a very positive light.
I haven’t really had any real issues with the app selection on Windows Phone; it’s just that there aren’t enough official apps for online services yet (Dropbox, Google+ are just a couple of examples) and the third-party apps created to fill the void for services like Google Reader, Tumblr are mostly paid apps. Once again, comparisons with Android/iOS once again place Windows Phone in a bad light because one can either download an official Tumblr app for free or pay to download an app by some dev just to use Tumblr. It doesn’t help that most apps are still rather pricey on the Windows Phone Marketplace and many of the free apps, even official apps like Evernote, Twitter for Windows Phone and the Facebook app are neglected, lacking or pure crap.
I’ve pretty much summed up the major issues I’ve had with Windows Phone but there’s still a whole bunch of smaller foibles about the platform that I’d like to share. Firstly, all apps and functionality on Windows Phone that require access to the Internet instant become completely useless when connected via GPRS. They just totally fail at loading a single thing on GPRS and become completely unusable. Sure, on Android, even my Twitter feed kind of takes an age to load on GPRS but on Windows Phone it doesn’t load at all. It’s 3G data or nothing with Windows Phone, and it’s frustrating that it’s not possible to force the device to stay on 3G-only mode in the network settings – it’s either dual mode or 2G-only. Secondly, Google accounts are supported in Windows Phone and adding an account pulls in your contacts, sets up Gmail and syncs your Google Calendar. It all sounds great until you realize that only your default Google Calendar is recognized on Windows Phone. Once again, I’ve been living without my school timetable for the past week. Thirdly, Internet Explorer Mobile is a competent mobile browser but it lacks any form of file download capabilities, it doesn’t seem to support Typekit fonts and there isn’t any real text reflow – if you zoom in past a certain point nothing you do will get that column of text to fit your display. Fourthly, for some strange, inexplicable and probably rather foolish reason, the focus mode in the camera app is set to Macro by default.
There’s no tethering on the Lumia 800, be it via USB or mobile hotspot. You can’t even select multiple images in the photo gallery. There’s no Bluetooth file transfer or, in fact, any way to get files onto the Lumia 800 apart from SkyDrive or by syncing them from Zune on the PC. I simply don’t get why Windows Phone is still so reliant on a PC for media sync and software updates in this day and age – even the iPhone has progressed past this archiac iPod paradigm from last decade. Smartphones should be able to work independently of a PC but that is simply not possible with Windows Phone. When I can stream my entire music collection on Google Music on my Android device and listen to any track I own without actually storing a single MP3 on my phone, having to sync media to the Lumia 800 using Zune on my PC seems downright old-fashioned and unacceptable.
I think it’s clear by now that Windows Phone, and by extension the Lumia 800, isn’t really for me. That’s not to say it isn’t for you – I think Windows Phone is aimed at people who aren’t geeks or tech enthusiasts and don’t want an iPhone for some reason. But to the seasoned Symbian/Android power user, Windows Phone is the dumb blonde of smartphone platforms – it sure is very good-looking, but it’s simply lacking up there where it matters. But Windows Phone isn’t even the reason why I simply couldn’t use the Lumia 800 any more after 5 days with it.
Ironically, it was battery life that spoiled the entire show. Battery life on my Lumia 800 has been horrendously poor, and this is coming from an Android user. Just yesterday, I unplugged the Lumia 800 at 11am and it was stone dead within 5 hours of moderate usage consisting mostly of Twitter and navigating around Windows Phone for demonstration purposes (I discussed the Lumia 800 with a friend over lunch). On another day, I unplugged the Lumia 800 at 7am and by 2pm I had only 30% remaining on the battery after moderate Twitter use and music playback. What makes such a result even more unacceptable is that the device spent a substantial amount of time untouched in my pocket (I was in school having class). I typically found myself with less than 50% left on the battery past noon assuming I started my day 3 hours earlier. This phone has utterly embarrassed me because I’ve actually had to sing songs out loud just to entertain myself on the hour-long train journey home each day. This simply renders the device completely unusable, and it makes me really sad because this makes recommending the Lumia 800 really hard.
I know the reasons why Nokia adopted a smartphone strategy around Windows Phone, and I understand those reasons completely. I certainly agree, as I expressed in my N9 review, that MeeGo couldn’t have stood a chance competing with rivals that are either much more established in the market and/or have a stronger set of web services and app developers supporting it. But I know that from my own perspective, if the Lumia 800 ran a delicious build of stock Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, I’d run out to the shops and put money down on one at once. That’s what absolutely kills me about this device. This, and the N9, remain as the most beautiful smartphones I’ve ever seen and held in my hand. But I just can’t see myself being happy owning and using a Lumia 800 as my only smartphone right now.
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has written 21 articles for The Mobile Fanatics.
I'm a full-time applied drama and psychology student and part-time blogger who's interested in the mobile industry and loves phones all at the same time. Send me an email or find me on Twitter @alv1nW.
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