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' …
The "grumpy" comments are, in my experience, largely quite unfair. e.g. I much prefer WP7's app list to endless screens of icons. I also think the criticism of Live Tiles is down to the reviewers ignorance on how WP7 works. So overall, I think it is reasonable for such minor, largely personal gripes not to have affected the overall score, given how well received the phone has been pretty much everywhere else.
And from the title I was talking about the review not the phone itself.
No comment on the maps from Nokia, how was the GPS signal pickup? Does this phone offer all the current Symbian methods of position determination?
The included headphones and music output as a whole got no mention which greatly disappointed me.
The included case that comes with the phone, worthless POS or actually worth using? Did it make the design issues worse or better for the reviewer? Was it even tried? How hard was it to get on the phone and then take off? Did it add excess bulk?
Charging time? Power consumption of said charger? Both when charging and not.
Design issues. OK you didn't find the design that great and I don't mind a reviewer saying that, but given it's been taken from the N9 nearly in its entirety I would wager that the build quality will be much much better than is hinted at in here. The technology of the screen got very short shrift. I find this baffling when it is of such a cutting edge nature.
Come on El Reg, stop pulling your punches. I come here looking for a review that lets the reader know that the phone has been truly used and abused. This reads like it was borrowed for 24 hours and that the reviewer had several other more important things to be doing at the same time. For a review score of 80% I would of expected much more detail. If you felt that all the phone had to offer was covered then I would of said the score, based on this review, should of been around the 58-62% range.
A more detail review on maps. See this write-up.
http://www.ic-mobile.com/blogs/97-nokia-in-2011-a-royal-wedding-without-belle-and-whistles
It doesn't have these features
" Choosing the type of route to use in navigation, such as avoiding ferries (This was demonstrated in a Youtube video where Lumia was taken out for a drive and got stuck in a ferry lane for 30mins).
Choosing how to get there, such as the shortest route or the quickest route.
Being able to just point to a location on the map and drive there, without keying in the address.
Favourites that can sync to Nokia Maps online service and a "Home" button to quickly navigate home.
Pronounce street names.
ETA status during Drive navigation.
Voice guided Walk navigation.
100% offline mode for walk and public transport direction.
"
So there's NO reason to even consider this phone at all.
WP7 STILL hasn't got a good navigation app. It lacks ALL the necesarry coms-features we take for granted with Symbian all for a facebook/twitter-centered contacts manager. Djeez.
Seems like I'm gonna get myself another C7 as spare. I don't want to ditch 5 years of technological advancement over this immature piece of crap no matter how great this crap looks from the outside.
This review is going to make many people quite upset. Are you actually saying that a Nokia with WP7 is a good idea? What about all the doomsayers that predicted a quick and swift death to both?
I have been a WP7 user since December, I don't believe that I have seen more than 10 people with one, most people I know with one are people on Xbox Live but, this time, I believe it is going to explode. Give it an year or so, and the platform will become mainstream.
Well done to Nokia and Microsoft for the gamble
Dare I get one for my wife ?
Android is probably a bit too messy and time consuming to work well for her (she likes "geeky" stuff and is technically competent but doesn't have the time to constantly monitor, adjust and tweak to keep things running).
Apple and iOS she doesn't particularly like and would find restrictive as she does want flexibility at times. Tight integration with Windows is required for business use.
Blackberry doesn't seem to offer the hardware form that she wants and the recent 3 day outage has put her right off.
Currently she still has a Nokia with Symbian and she has aleways liked Nokia's build quality and to be honest, styling. Strangely a key feature for her is absolute volume of the ringer. She sometimes works in noisy environments and needs a substantial ring tone volume level which surprisingly many phones are pretty feeble at.
This review picks up the point that phones these days are definitely multimedia devices first and have a phone function as an option, but this isn't always well integrated.
I might just pass for the moment, or maybe take a punt on the Lumia710 as a cheaper first pass which one of the kids can take on if she doesn't get on with it.
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I have been a WP7 user since Oct last year and I have to say yes I would get your Wife the Nokia 800 for her next phone. I was a big Android user but I always fund problems with it slowing down freezing and had various problems depending on which android device I had.
I got the HD7 as I like big screens on my phones and I have to say it was not much different to my HD2 in terms of specs but the software worked very well for a first gen WP7 OS. I upgraded about a month ago to the Titan and this is even better for me as the screen is nice and big for my big hands. But what you should look at is what WP7 offers over other devices like Android and IOS. You get Just on WP7 phones you get Zune Pass, Xbox Live, Office, SkyDrive, Camera button which unlocks phone when pressed, People hub with Facebook twitter Linked in and MSN intergration.Bing search, Scout, Music, Vision and Voice commands. A desent app store that is getting bigger and better each day. Cross xbox and WP7 games and live tiles. The Nokia also has Nokia Maps, Nokia drive and Nokia Music to add to that list too.
My GF was a big Iphone user and after playing with my HD7 she decided she would give it a try and got a HTC 7 Pro and said she will never go back to Iphone again.
Alot of people think WP7 is a bad move for Nokia but I dont think it was. If you look at the other option they had in android that is more or less owned by Samsung and HTC so for Nokia to stand out would of been hard where with WP7 HTC and samsung are the bigger names but no one has really got the number one spot yet which makes it a good choice for Nokia.
But The software is by the best on any phone os out there fast and stable. Yes no phone has a duel core processor or over 512mb of ram but this is because WP7 dose not need it where android dose.
Its your choice on what you get for your wife but I think once you both have a play with it in the shop you may well like it and be surprised on how well the OS works and how nice the new nokia phone feels.
"Dare I get one for my wife ?"
No. It's a POS. It only looks nice/different from the outside. At least the cyan one match the ugly cyan tiles that are being used in that thing that they sell as a UI.
"Tight integration with Windows is required for business use."
This device is as tightly integrated with "Windows" as an Android phone. There's NO outlook synchronization. In case you can't remember what Outlook is. It's that PIM that Microsoft shoved in our throats for over a decade in it's most expensive iteration of MS Office. The funny thing is that apart from it's former 2-GB PST-file trouble, it's actually pretty good. A very comprehensive contact manager and very extensible calendar. Small business and self employed businessppl (like myself) relied on it for years. Synced phones daily through a simple easy 1-2-3 process with the supplied USB-cable (or in some cases over bluetooth). Contacts kept private on the local PC.
Unfortunatly that same Microsoft that enforced Outlook upon us suddenly turned Cloud. And wants us to store data on THEIR servers (they're copying this attitude from Google apparently). Gone is your privacy as these Clouds get inevitably hacked and cracked some day and these companies hand over customer data (including YOUR contacts!) whenever the US-authorities came around for a tea-visit .
The trouble is. That your wife works with Symbian today. She's accustomed to syncing calender and contacts with the USB-cable. She's familiar with a full blown navigation tool on her phone that links both calender- and contact-addresses. She probably uses the onboard FM-transmitter to occasionally play that MP3-song on her phone through the car stereo. She can today record that telephone call from that customer to deal with later (when she's at the home-office). All these things she can't do (yet/ever) on this new-kid-on-the-block.
This phone is a setback 5 years. An immature OS which centers around a chaotic gimmick-website Facebook (while most FB-users don't even provide much details on their profile as Mr. Orlowsky himself admits). He's comments about none-tech-savvy users using webmail as primary email-source is pure bollocks. Most ppl use the POP-account provided by their ISP. In fact at installation of 'the Internet' must technicians set-up this account for their customers. The places where I've seen free webmail (usually live/hotmail) based accounts being used is by 'the kids' while parents use the POP-accounts, the kids use hotmail (prime reason: its Live messenger integration). The only ppl that I've seen using GMail are the ones with an Android phone. Again as a self-employed professional myself I have a company POP-account through the hosting of my company-website. I use THAT. So a FB/twitter/hotmail/gmail-centric toy is useless for me. And no, self-employed professionals don't have to money nor time to invest in a Windows 2008-server + exchange server or whatever MS can come up with.
I'd say, buy her a nice C7 8GB, a USB-cable extender (as the 10cm USb is way too short. ARE YOU LISTENING NOKIA) and a nice leather pouch. I'd go for the mahogany brown model as it looks flashy without screaming toy and because its hard to find it's exclusive enough to be noticed.
What started out to be a promising review turned out to be a negative review of Mango and the Lumia 800 by a iPhone (most likely) or Android user. Even the likes of Preston Grala who has been a Microsoft adversary for a long time gave Mango a better rating than you and he is a very well respected critic. It's clear you really didn’t like it, but that's your choice. The fact you prefer folders and grid icons like Windows NT 3.51 style of the 90’s again that's your choice. I had an iPhone for nearly 3 years, loved it ad would have had the iPhone 4 if it wasn't for Steve Jobs famously saying that there was nothing wrong with the iPhone 4, it was the users at fault for holding it wrong. That sheer arrogance drove me WP7. It took a week or so to get used to it, but the Metro design that you so dislike is like nothing out there. As I said above, both iPhone and Android (un-customised) as so pedestrian and old fashioned with their Windows NT 3.51 style desktops and the equally old fashioned “in app out app” approach and Metro is so fresh and invigorating. WP7 is a true cloud phone, and as you rightly said, it does not require a PC or Macintosh as all your contacts are stored in Windows Live so you're not reliant on old fashioned syncing with a home or work device. As for the Bing search button on the front, you must be quite ham fisted if you kept accidentally pressing it, I do not have the same problem and find it a really great "one touch" way of finding stuff. The sharp corner design is awesome, I love it, it makes it stand out from the everyday humdrum rounded corner boxes, Nokia is to be praised for that.
I found your comments or lack of them about IE9 intriguing, I have an Omnia 7 (Focus S winging it’s way from the USA as we speak) and I don’t have the font problems you seem to have, perhaps it’s a Nokia screen issue, or maybe something else.
It really does not bother me who sells more phones or who has the best and most flashlight apps or even that WP7 does not have a myriad of Anti-Virus programs that Android users have, all I care about is that the likes of Microsoft and Nokia et al quietly just keep doing what they are doing. By the way, my 74 year old mum has an iPhone as well as do many of her friends
Do me a favour, use the phone solely (put your iPhone in a drawer or something) for 30 days then come back and write a review ;-)
Interesting they used the N9 chassis, presumably to kill off Meego. It's approximately the same price as the 16G version.
Oh, Andrew - please don't start a sentence with the conjunction "And". My English teacher would spin in his grave if I did that! ;-)
Otherwise, good review, thanks.
So it can import address books from various sources, but can it export that data? Or is WP7 yet another example of the classic Microsoft roach motel, where your contacts are expected to stay forever, forever?
(I know documents and pictures on Skydrive at least can be rescued by connecting to it with a PC, to my surprise this worked even with non-IE browsers)
Your data stays where it is, it's more of a sync than an import.
Too posh for hotmail and got all your contacts on Gmail? No problem, sync the account and when you throw the phone away your contacts are all still on G-mail where they started. no lock-in here! When you add a new contact to G-mail, (hotmail, facebook, whatever) it automagically syncs itself to the phone.
Works both ways too, you get the choice of where to store any contacts when you add them via the device.
So, you review phones and don't know that the hardware search button always brings you to Bing? It's not a Lumia thing. Moreover, it was changed in Mango so that it' can't be used for contextual searches anymore. OTOH, speaking of search, I didn't see you mentioning the sound/visual searches. I guess MS needs to make something that calls you "ambulance" when you ask it to actually call an ambulance to draw some attention...
"you can’t fast scroll through the address book alphabetically"
This is the second WP7 review I've read on here that says that. 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
"There is no conventional address book: this phone will not sync contacts with your Mac or PC, or even barely acknowledge they exist. Instead, there’s the People application that piggybacks on to Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter, and it’s more helpful to think of it as a record of “Stuff people have done""
I tend to avoid using social media and so this feature definitely does not appeal. Without an address book being included, I can't see Nokia's Windows-based smartphones being of interest to me.
Why can't Nokia have two modes; this social media mode and a traditional address book mode? Oh, of course, it's because they don't control the software and Microsoft dictate the feature set.
I don't keep phone numbers in GMail or Hotmail, because the phone I have is owned by my employer and the numbers in my phone are clients.
I keep them in my phone and sync to the corporate contacts server (Exchange in this case), like every corporate user.
Like every sane employee I do *not* put work stuff on Facebook, Twitter etc, and do not want my work phone to have anything to do with either of them.
So if this review is anything to go by, Windows Phone 7 cannot be used in the coporate market.
That's a fairly odd decision - perhaps there is enough demand for personal phones, however it feels a bit weird for Microsoft to reject the only market that ever took Windows Mobile on board.
WP will sync contacts, calendar, and emails from Exchange so you don't have to use google, hotmail or whatever.
I use mine for both and post to twitter, etc with my personal account and use my work account for work business.
This review is very misleading, it sounds like the reviewer picked one up for half an hour and had a play with it while keeping their iphone in the other hand
Microsoft said when they killed of Windows Mobile that Windows Phone 7 IS NOT for the corporate market. They told that press that Windows Mobile 6.x professional would be kept for those users.
Windows Phone 7 is for kids who play with facebook/twitter, play music on the go and are interested in XBox-games. The most 'tech-savvy market' they aim at is indeed XBox-live customers.
This is obviously a toy phone for teenagers. Why can't you ppl comprehend that? Microsoft is turning into a toy company for rich kids whom are a tiny bit more rebellious than their Apple pampered counterparts. As apple is also turning into a portable games-console/media-player business it's clear where this will end for business execs.
And blimey - are they genuinely that insane?
Windows Mobile is the worst pile of shit I've ever had the misfortune to encounter, and as far as I can tell it's been dropped completely by all the phone manufacturers, and not used for any new designs at all.
So much for 'corporate' use.
Choice of corporate phone now seems to be a toss-up between Blackberry and Android, pretty much depending on whether you want to let RIM inside your firewall or not.
Being playing with a 701, and whilst it's definitely no iPhone with regard to pretty UI transitions etc, it does pretty much everything the iPhone does (and in some cases more).
Battery life is very impressive - haven't charged for two days and still going. But I don't call a lot.
Cameras good too.
Come on, only Orlowski could do a "review" of the prostitute, sorry, lumia, phones? With such gems as "WinPho 7 now offers a better experience for ordinary punters than its Android rivals." to start with, and with mr. Orlowski latest articles lauding and praising the colourful fischer-price like interface, how much credibility does this have?
I know all the softies will downvote me at once (yes, all 10 that vote here regularly), but come on, can you be more transparent than this?
Maybe. Usually all comments mentioning the ugliness of WP7 and its limitations get the same 10 downvotes, though. But you're right, this time we'll get also the few remaining Nokia employees, not only the softies, downvoting my comments.
Still, that won't change the fact that WP7 is ugly as sin, apparently targeted at dummies with its limited copy of android's widgets, still way behind android (if it is at iOS 2008 level as you claim, then maybe in 4 years it will catch up to the current - 3.x - android incarnation), and the hardware is meh at best, not even the same level as last year phones. But I suppose some people will still buy it, if only due to the Nokia brand.
Wow, for a phone that scored 80% that really comes off as a negative review, like you were annoyed it was so good. Atleast it's not just being compared to the iPhone, but the entire of Nokia's old products. How that's relevant I'm not sure, but there we go.
Also, hardware stats: not including them is a cop out.
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