Once the undisputed king of the mobile phone world, Nokia has seen its market share steadily plummet in the last few years.
The increasing popularity of iPhone and Android smartphones, and Nokia’s inability to keep up with the changing face of mobile phones, has led to a significant drop in the company’s fortunes.
While they had some success with the N8, Nokia has finally decided to drop Symbian altogether and the recent N9 had the lack of support from the MeeGo platform.
While MeeGo is an enjoyable OS, Nokia is now placing all of its eggs in a new basket – Windows Phone 7.
Nokia and Microsoft now have an exclusive deal and, for the next few years at least, Nokia will just be producing Windows smartphones.
The Nokia Lumia comes in on the back of all of this and is set to push the Nokia charge into the premium phone market.
While it is a premium phone in looks and experience, Nokia Lumia contracts are actually very competitively priced, and offer greater value for money than a comparable iPhone 4S contract.
The Lumia 800 comes into existence with a very similar appearance to that of the Nokia N9, with its polycarbonate body, which to be honest is extremely strong and also very good looking.
The colours available really add a spark to proceedings and the phone has a certain minimalist design quality that we really enjoyed the look of.
The device also comes with a good screen in that of the 3.7 inch AMOLED display, which is the same sort used on Samsung’s higher end phones and has received a lot of acclaim recently.
This screen is fantastic and we really loved the look of everything on it such was its brightness.
With ClearBlack technology, the Lumia will also suffer much less sun reflections than other phones do, making it great for indoor and outdoor usage.
The images produced by the display are smooth and really show off Windows Phone 7 in its full glory.
In fact Windows 7.5 is one of the shining parts of the phone and the OS really lifts Nokia out of the doldrums.
The beautiful OS with its tiled front menu and very fluid movement looks fantastic and is in fact also fantastic and multitasking is amazing. 3D animation is also a strong point and the phone is functional and stylish in this area- something many fail to achieve.
Nokia has also added a decent camera into the mix on the phone and the 8mp Carl Zeiss lens creates great snaps, as does the 720p video.
This all shows up in clarity on the excellent display and it is really enjoyable to use.
Of course the phone’s processor is also a much improved one and the single core 1.4GHz chip, works well in tandem with the OS to offer a very smooth ride, with great multitasking.
Though not a dual core it really does well and the 512MB of RAM and 16GB of memory are sufficient to make the best Nokia we’ve seen for a long, long time.
Its decision to move to Windows and not choose android was a make or break one for Nokia, and while at the start of the year many Nokia fans most likely slapped their faces into their palms, thinking ‘”why?”, the Nokia Lumia shows that it may very well be the best decision the Finnish company has made for quite a few years now.
Nokia has vowed to spend more on marketing this smartphone than any other phone it has ever produced, so expect endless television adverts for the next few months.
