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Today we are reviewing the Lumia 800 – Nokia’s brave attempt at taking on the Apple -Android duopoly. It is the first Nokia phone running Windows Phone 7.5 operating system, an upgrade to Windows Phone 7. The OS is much the same as other Windows Phone devices, but they’ve added some trademark Nokia apps like Maps and Nokia Music. The Lumia 800 is essentially the N9 with a different operating system, which makes it the best of both worlds.

Hardware

The phone body is solid Nokia build made of polycarbonate plastic. We are starting to see more handsets using this material latest being the HTC One X.  It has a good weight to it – at 142g it feels nice and solid in the hand. 1.4 GHz processor might feel weak compare to the quad cores doing the rounds now but it matches up with the OS and you never feel the device is under powered in any way.

Lets start with the screen. Its 3.7” WVGA – small by todays standards. But colours are very vibrant and it comes with the Nokia Clear Black technology which does work as advertised. The screen is Gorilla glass and curves very gently.

Lets look around the phone. On the side you have the volume rocker, power button and the camera key. Down the bottom is the speaker grille. Its lasered in so you cant really feel anything when you run your fingers over it.

Up the top is the 3.5 mm headphone jack, micro USB charging port and this slideout tray for a microSIM. It all opens up and shuts back together in perfect origami style.

On the back is the 8MP camera with Carl Zeiss optics and a dual LED flash. Nokia really know how to put together a great camera. It has the largest sensor of any camera phone today.

Software

Nokia Lumia runs the very beautiful and slickly designed Windows Phone 7.5 operating system.  The homescreen is loaded with Live tiles that you can customize endlessly.

Take the messaging app. Everything is smooth and dynamic as screens flow seamlessly from one to the next. You have the option to integrate your messaging and emails with a host of mail accounts.

Nokia Maps is excellent as well. GPS locks on extremely quickly. Nokia’s highly successful Drive application comes pre installed for free. We did need to download 200 megs of Australian maps at startup, but it works a treat. It includes fantastic turn by turn navigation for most countries. Maps are cached on the device itself which means the navigation will work fine even if you don’t have connectivity.

Nokia Music is another one of Nokia’s own additions to the Lumia 800. The app integrates nicely with the Zune media player but also brings a bunch of cool features. You can also download music for offline listening.

Lets look at the browser. It runs IE9 and works surprisingly well. It loads very quickly and scrolling is a breeze – we tested our unit with the ABC website and PhonesandPlans of course. The 1.4 GHz Qualcomm processor works a treat. You don’t miss a dual core processor at all.

The middle Windows key is the home button. And more interestingly, the back arrow key pulls up the multitasking menu so you can see all your applications where you left off, and clicking on any app thumbnail will take you straight back in.

Interestingly most apps have a black background. This is clever design by Windows and Nokia – not only does it look great but also means improved power efficiency as the phone does not waste battery lighting up each pixel every time.

Application Marketplace:

This is where Nokia and Windows lags far behind Apple and Android app stores, though to be fair a number of popular apps have started showing up on the Windows Mobile platform.  We reviewed the app for TED talks. It is beautifully integrated with fonts, scrolling etc. Microsoft provide detailed design guidelines for application developers – something Android should think about as well.

Battery Life:

The Nokia Lumia 800 is a data hog as the tiles update constantly fetching data from your Facebook, Twitter, webpages to keep the tile upto date. It uses up a lot of battery too though we got more than a day out of a single charge with some pretty serious usage.

So there you have it. The Nokia Lumia 800.

It is available in Australia with all major carriers. Telstra plans start from $59/month, Optus from $33/month, Vodafone at $39 and Virgin offers the cheapest deal at $31/month. We would recommend getting a plan with at least 1 GB data just because this phone needs a lot of it.