Nokia Lumia 800 Review - Nokia's Brave New Foray into WP7
by Brian Klug on January 4, 2012 7:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Nokia
- windows phone 7
- Mobile
- WP7
- Lumia
- Lumia 800
Display
The Lumia 800 uses a WVGA (800x480) 3.7” Super AMOLED display which of course comes with RGBG PenTile. The reality is that Windows Phone actually feels like it’s designed around AMOLED to some extent, so this isn’t nearly as big of a concern as it would be otherwise. In fact, WP7 does take advantage of AMOLED’s light-emitting nature to display as much black as possible unless you change the background theme, but anyhow onto the display itself.
Because we can’t set the brightness manually in the settings UI, we have to rely on the Low/Medium/High presets that are defined already. There’s actually a way to set the brightness manually inside ##634# but it isn’t clear whether these settings persist after exiting. As usual, we’ve measured brightness and white point - AMOLED blacks are literally zero thanks to the light-emitting nature of that display technology.
I find that the Lumia 800 isn’t as dark as the numbers would have you believe, though it could benefit from going a bit brighter. No doubt Nokia has chosen to err on the conservative side to conserve some battery life.
| Lumia 800 Display Metrics | |||
| Brightness Level | Black Brightness (nits) | White Brightness (nits) | White Point (K) |
| High | 0 | 196.1 | 5854 |
| Medium | 0 | 44.8 | 6043 |
| Low | 0 | 11.6 | 6117 |
The curved nature of the Corning Gorilla Glass display is another thing to discuss as well. It looks great and isn’t curved so much that it gets in the way of dragging things around on the display or interacting. Of course, at the most extreme viewing angles (as you approach a critical angle) you do see some total internal reflection effects, but that ends up being literally viewed from the extreme side or bottom.
As usual I’ve also put together an outdoor viewing gallery in addition to some different viewing angles of the display for your perusal. Nokia’s ClearBlack display helps things here, as they’ve placed a circular polarizer between the touch layer and the front display glass to eliminate some reflections.
I feel as though WP7 is one of the first UIs that’s designed with some of the AMOLED/PenTile display guidelines taken to heart, though there’s still more that WP7 could do to leverage some of AMOLEDs unique strengths. Little functions like displaying the time or status even when the phone is locked are things that other Nokia phones with AMOLED have done for a while that really made sense and served an important purpose that aren’t done in WP7 quite yet.
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Thermogenic - Wednesday, January 4, 2012 - link
Agreed, the Windows Phone keyboard is the best software keyboard out there, at least for the default ones installed on the major platforms.doubledeej - Thursday, January 5, 2012 - link
WP7 by far as the best default on-screen keyboard. And its auto correction is the best I've seen on any device, ever.JNo - Wednesday, January 4, 2012 - link
"SIM cutters are now so ubiquitous..."Ubiquitous means omnipresent so something is either ubiquitous or not - there aren't varying levels of it. "SIM cutters are now ubiquitous" is enough.
Likewise things are unique (one of a kind) but not "quite unique" or "very unique" like I read daily. *pet peeve*
Ok grammar (well vocab I guess) nazi moment over. I do understand that language evolves so I guess I'm just an old curmudgeon for wanting words to keep their meaning...
essemzed - Wednesday, January 4, 2012 - link
I'm currently a BlackBerry user: nice sound tool, but I'm on the market for something "newer" and more "future proof".I use my phone as a tool and not having a replaceable battery is a capital sin for me: I want to have a second charged battery at hand and be able to quickly replace the dead one when I run out of gas.
Same problem with iPhones (not to mention my allergy to apples).
Android: I had a Samsung Galaxy Nexus in my hands for few minutes and it looks quite OK, but it is too large for my tastes and habits.
I want to make calls, some SMS texting, a fast user interface, a good browser, a robust Outlook and GoogleApps integration, possiblity to access and store my most used and important documents (Word, Excel, PDF), a good and very robust passwords "keychain". Very valuable pluses would be a good media (mostly music) library and possiblity to use Skype (even if only when on WiFi).
It is my feeling that WP 7.5 could be the right stuff for me, but is there any WP 7.5 phone around with a replacebale battery?
Very nice review, thanks!
Sergio
Thermogenic - Thursday, January 5, 2012 - link
Windows Phone definitely does not have good Google Apps integration. Really the only thing Google that is done well is Gmail. The phone does do Office better than anything else, as should be expected.The Zune music library with Zune Pass is excellent, IMO, but it does pretty much tie you to a single machine. It's nice that it syncs over WiFi painlessly - the lack of "USB Storage mode" is a little overblown, IMO.
Oddly, there is no Skype support at all, although that HAS to be coming soon as Microsoft now owns Skype.
Thermogenic - Thursday, January 5, 2012 - link
Commenting further on Zune Pass, it's actually four devices (any combination of PCs, Zune, and Windows Phone), but if you have a second family member using the pass, you are essentially going to each have one mobile device and one PC. If you are alone, in theory you can use multiple PCs, but then keeping synchronized is a mess and you end up just using the one PC.batmanuel - Friday, January 13, 2012 - link
Even the Gmail integration feels a little half-assed in Android. On my Atrix it is a huge pain having one mail app for all my other accounts, and one for just Gmail. I'd much prefer if there was one unified mail app. With my previous Android phone, HTC did have an app that could check Gmail with everything else, but then I wound up with double email notifications since the Gmail app would also notify me. I haven't tried ICS yet, but there's a lot of little annoyances in Android that add up to a bit of a hot mess in the end.ct760ster - Thursday, January 5, 2012 - link
Pun in tongue, literally is shown at the conclusion pictures. Few handsets has evenly flat sides.sachinD - Thursday, January 5, 2012 - link
didnt see this mentioned but this is a feature that is missing big time. No Skype video calls !!!Thermogenic - Thursday, January 5, 2012 - link
There is no Skype for Windows...