Nokia Lumia 800
For the first time in ages, it's possible to recommend a Nokia phone to somebody in the pub. Nokia's first Windows-based device is the company's most attractive consumer product for some years, at least in the modern era of touchscreen smartphones. Nokia Lumia 800 Windows Phone 7.5 Mango handset A reversal of fortune? Nokia's …
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Err?
No. Clearly not.
Take the Large Hadron Collider just after it opened, it was technologically the most complex machine ever made, but at a very early stage in its maturity, running significantly below the power that it was capable of.
You may want to recheck the screenshots
some NSFW language in the review screen?
Doesn't bother me but you know there'll be SOMEBODY who get's all offended.
No signal-strength indicator?
Oh why, Microsoft? It's prettty important to me in the sticks, especially when I have to place my phone in a metal box to force my phone to lose its minimal ('one bar') Orange signal and thus latch onto to the locally stronger T-mobile signal in order to converse with people.
I hope this matures well, though.
There is a signal strength indicator
Just tap the top of the screen
But not permanently
Unlike every other mobile phone I have used since they went digital
QUIZ!
A quick tap at the top of the screen becomes a major inconvenience when you check your signal:
a) every now and then
b) in certain necessary circumstances
c) every time I make a phone call
d) way more often than can possibly be necessary
rewsna tcerroc eht si (d
'Minor' irritations cause far more annoyance than you might think.
For example, try putting a small pea in your shoe next time you go out for the day. That's pretty minor, yes?
Equally, try putting a bit of stickytape over the part of your current phone that shows the signal strength. I suspect you'll find it a bit annoying, especially as there's plenty of space to show the information.
Rather like the regular "The action could not be completed for an unknown reason" errors that pop up on Windows Mobile 6 whenever it's lost signal.
RE: "The action could not be completed for an unknown reason"
Wait till you see what they have in store for with Windows 8 :-)
Fair enough review
While the reviewer perhaps had a few too many complaints, as a soon-to-be first time WP user I like to know how contact syncing works and that searching for contacts wasn't as easy as it could be.
I've already planned on buying this phone, in spite of knowing the design flaw of the usb charging port, but that IS a very legitimate complaint that DOES need addressing.
I was surprised to read a complaint about the browser; every other review out there has nothing but praise for IE9 on WP.
"I like to know how contact syncing works and that searching for contacts wasn't as easy as it could be."
Ignore that, he's wrong.
You can sync contacts with outlook, windows live, google, probably yahoo too. There are shortcuts in the contacts list too - just tap the letter you want to jump to
I checked, and no, you cannot sync with Outlook.
It turns out that you can sync contacts with Exchange (humble pie duly eaten), but *not* with Outlook.
Basically, you can only sync to a 'cloud', and it is completely impossible to sync contacts with a locally connected computer.
A rather foolish decision in my opinion, given that the top two (iOS and Android) allow you to do both.
If you tap the letter in your list of apps or contact you get an alphabet - tap the letter to go to the start of the list... this will only happen after you have a list of a specific size or greater... (not sure of the amount).
I love WP7 - waiting for the next lot of nokia phones, these offer very little new to what I have got already...
"Digital Slime Trail" .... thanks for that
If this phone imports all of your contact info, from everywhere, then uses it to aggregate all social interactions to the device.... does that mean that Microsoft will start spamming all your friends in your name (and everyone else you've ever emailed) just like FB did when I accidentally let it get hold of my gmail addresses?
Never had that happen to me.
I suppose the closest thing would be updating your status across loads of social networks at once, but you can select which ones to update at any given time
Same internals?
710 has 8GB, 800 has 16GB. Is that not an internal?
Camera is quite different on the 710 - 5mp vs 8mb, no dual LED flash...
Different screen.
But other than that, I suppose same processor = same internals?
It also seems that lots of manufacturers are dropping MicroSD support for mango. Anecdotally, it seems to have caused quite a lot of trouble as the MicroSD card needs to run at the same speed as internal memory to work without issues. Rather than explain that to the mass market, it seems manufacturers have removed the facility. HTC Radar, HTC titan are missing them... Shame.
If someone figures out a way to dual boot this with meego might be worth a look.
Paranoia getting in the way of useful consumer advice
WP7 will sync your contacts and calender info with Gmail or Hotmail just by signing into your account. I suspect that in this day and age 99% of smartphone buyers care more about that than sync options with a PC. Still less a Mac.
Nice actually, but what I really would like to see are technical details: What exactly is supported with all the services WP7 syncs with? Just phone numbers and email addresses is not enough. What's with company name, street addresses, contact photo, birthdays and relationships... Even Google actually sucks quite a bit here.
For casual use the most basic things will certainly be enough, but for any kind of professional/business use I would really like to see a table of what gets synced here.
Actually, "Will it synch" locally was my primary concern with my most recent phone purchase. And the LAST ting I want is to rely on a social network to keep my personal info.
No, it won't. WP7 can only sync contacts to cloud services.
It does make sense from Microsoft's position - it pushes you towards putting all your personal data onto their servers.
That's fine if you trust Microsoft not to abuse all that private data, but...
not social networks
It syncs with your hotmail, gmail account, facebook etc is additional option you can disable. It syncs with exchange but not your local outlook. Of course your local outlook may already be syncing with your hotmail. Personally I found it little inconvenient but once I stored my address data in hotmail I know they are always accessible from anywhere in the world and won't bother with my local outlook again.
The 800 is not available on Amazon, or at least isn't showing yet, but you can buy from Three on PAYG for £400 - see http://threestore.three.co.uk/payg/dealsummary.aspx?offercode=DSL15PP349. You might want to update the article, Andrew.
quick scroll
"When you have the address book open, click on one of the header letters in the coloured block, and it brings up an A-Z list for you to get where you need to quickly"
err....that's not quickscroll and it's a damn site less easy to use than the fast scroll system used by iOS and Android. I'd say the comments in both Reg articles stand.
"err....that's not quickscroll and it's a damn site less easy to use than the fast scroll system used by iOS and Android."
I'd say that fast scrolling with 500-1000 contacts is pretty much useless, I even use more the search contact function rather than jumping to the first letter.
Do you know what fast scroll is?
It means the facility to run your finger up or down the screen quickly to trigger a list of the letters in the alphabet that you can scroll through A-B-C-D-E, The number of contacts is irrelevant, there are only 26 letters in the English alphabet. What's important is how fast you can get to those contacts starting with each letter. Fast scroll does not mean scrolling quickly through all your contacts, despite the name.
So if you say, need someone in the T's, then you've gotta scroll through most of the alphabet before selecting?? With WP7, it's two taps, done. Although I agree with OP, search is miles better for either platform if you have zillions of contacts.
"It means the facility to run your finger up or down the screen quickly to trigger a list of the letters in the alphabet"
Yes and a similar thing is available also on WP7. But with hundreds of contacts is still useless because once you land on the letter bucket, you still have to scroll through too many names (unless you are always searching for Xenu and similar friends...)
I stand on what I said: I find search more useful (then again, as we already said several times, also in WP7 you can bring the letters and select what you want)
80%!?
Battery life, profiles, and call quality are quite important for a lot of people (well, me). How the hell did call quality go down, I thought that was a hardware feature?
Perhaps we could have a comparison with a 700 (Symbian Belle). For argument's sake we can assume that both will be around in 5 years time and it'd be interesting to see which scores better on functionality alone instead of emotional baggage.
First, take the N9
Then while putting a rubbish WinCE based OS on, ruin the design with stupid old fashioned buttons and make sure the search button can't be changed from the search engine only MSFT employees use.
Then make sure the camera isn't up to usual Nokia smartphone standards, and while you're at it reduce the call quality and hobble the battery life.
My Meego phone has none of these problems!
That's because it's not really a Nokia
The innards and antenna are made by Compal, an off-the-shelf WP7 board (because they are all the same). And the camera is better than the one on the E7, better sensor and not EDoF - low-light performance is bad because you can't do miracles with small-and-thin camera modules after Nokia caught all that flak about the lardness of the N8 camera.
Of course, being Andrew, no mention of how the Maemo6 in the N9 was the modern platform Nokia needed and already had, with an app GRID, letter scroll shortcuts, Skype integration, Opera (which will never be ported to WP7 because of MS rules), and TWO days of battery life (and the N9 is a real Nokia in reception and call quality)
Now I understand everything
Reduced to off-the-shelf boards. I'm not surprised call quality and battery life have gone to the dogs, Elop strikes again.
If they've changed their camera design because of flak then it wouldn't be the first time they've taken too much notice of bloggers and armchair critics. They should carry on including N8-style cameras in their top-end phones, if you want 12MP you've got them and if you want widescreen you've got that too (in 9MP mode).
How much?!
That is truly terrible value. Just look at the Xperia Arc S compared to this and you have a better handset and smartphone for almost £150 cheaper!
Tethering, IE9
The review doesn't make it clear that not supporting tethering is a failure of the Lumina, not windows phone mango. I have an HTC radar at work and it support tethering just fine.
IE9 is fine on my HTC mozart, I've read in another review that the blurry fonts on the lumia are a bi-product of the screen choice.
As has been posted before, can we just get a review of Mango with all the features thrashed out and then review the phones as reviews of the hardware and additional software only.
Nokia have stated that they're working on getting the tethering sorted in an upcoming update .
http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/04/nokia-promises-tethering-for-lumia-800-points-finger-of-blame-a/
@Goat Jam
The iPhone1 was immature and sophisticated at the same time. That's why it took off.
@Dave 126
A signal indicator is pretty meaningless anyway. They said it on QI so it must be true.
Empty shell compared to the N8
I have played briefly with samples of the 800 & 710 and it has the shiny shiny but no where near the customisable grunt I get from my current device.
Read/write from/to external USB memory being a big one.
Symbian may seem complicated to some but you can really make it do things that other phones just wont. Maybe its just me who like messing with settings & trying things out? FM transmitter too, proper useful.
Maybe the N8 was/is the pinnacle of what a phone can do & its all down hill from here in to the phones for nuggets sphere who like shiny over function, but I sincerly hope not.
Only gripe is that Orange take an age to release OTA updates, but other than that, boss!
Gonna take a lot more to prise me away from S^3
I lost confidence in the review when I read...
"the vast majority of non-technical people have always used a webmail service as their primary personal e-mail account. And Facebook or LinkedIn are considered the natural upgrade to e-mail. "
What utter nonsense.
Re: I lost confidence in the review when I read...
Yep.
Before Facebook most person-to-person non-realtime messaging was done over email. Public protocols, mostly.
Now it's done via Facebook - walled garden.
Disussed here:
Facebook: Privatising the internet, one Poke at a time
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/16/facebook_embrace_and_extend_email_hubris/print.html
Next they'll laud the *polyphonic* ringtone support
Can it support ringtones over 39seconds? No.
How about tones over 1mb in filesize? No.
How about custom tones for message, email and alarms? No.
These aren't Lumia failings, they're WP failings, pretty basic but personally a new phone feels like my new phone once it makes the noises I want it to. That way I always know if MY phone is ringing.
Custom ringtones
I believe that you can do custom ringtones, something to do with making an mp3 setting it to type "ringtone" in Zune, then syncing it. Not sure how to do it, because while it was almost a no-sale issue when I got my WP7, it turns out that I can't be bothered with custom ringtones after all.
Meego
Can I install Meego on it? If not, I suggest to crush these and use the material to build a raft for shipping Elop back to the colonies.
Strange...
At the start of this review I saw the score, and the bold statement that WP7 is now better than Android, and I thought that maybe my view of WP7 could be wrong. This is a view that was formed from my experience with test handsets by HTC back when the OS was first released, and is in essence that the OS is clunky, confusing and inflexible. I've not read anything since then to change that view.
However there were so many little irksome points mentioned throughout the review that I wonder at how such a high score was arrived? For most of those niggles I found myself thinking "well, that doesn't happen" or "you can change that behaviour" in comparison with Android. Or even with IOS in some cases.
The review gives me the impression that progress has been made, but it still doesn't inspire me to change my disinclination to recommend WP7 to anyone, technical or not. As so often seems to be the case with Microsoft products: I think I'll wait for the next service pack.
Ordinary?
"WinPho 7 now offers a better experience for ordinary punters than its Android rivals"
Just how ordinary do they have to be? Or did you mean thick?
Re: Ordinary?
To some techies, "non-techie" is synonymous with "stupid". Not here.
Synonymous?
It is, if defines a category of users that will choose a WP7 toy over an android smartphone...
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