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
Cellular
Cellular on the Lumia 800 is supplied courtesy the MSM8255’s onboard baseband. Like all the Qualcomm S2 parts, this means GSM/EDGE/WCDMA with HSPA+. The Lumia 800 also takes a microSIM as noted earlier, and I tested on AT&T in my market. There are actually two Lumia 800 variants, each with different WCDMA bands - we were sampled the European variant which worked with AT&T’s PCS 1900 MHz WCDMA in my market. The Nokia Lumia 800 Specifications page is a bit misleading since it would have you believe that there’s only one variant with quad-band WCDMA when there are actually two different tri-band WCDMA devices.
| Nokia Lumia 800 - Network Support | |
| GSM/EDGE Support | 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 MHz |
| RM-801 (Europe) WCDMA Support | 900 / 1900 / 2100 MHz |
| RM-819 (USA) WCDMA Support | 850 / 1900 / 2100 MHz |
| Baseband Hardware | QCT MDM8255 w/QTR8200 |
| HSPA Speeds | HSDPA 14.4 (Cat.10) / HSUPA 5.76 (Cat.6) |
I couldn’t do my usual stats collection and histogram on the Lumia 800 since there’s no way to export that data from any of the speed test applications on Windows Phone. However, I did run some tests and see acceptable levels of throughput out of the device.
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Some speedtests taken with BandWidth on WP7
WiFi
WiFi and Bluetooth 2.1 EDR on the Lumia 800 is supplied courtesy of a Broadcom BCM4329 combo chip which we’ve seen numerous times before in a number of different smartphones. Though newer devices are starting to ship BCM4330, I wager that WP7.5 includes drivers for just BCM4329 (which a huge majority of Windows Phones include) and BCM4325 (Venue Pro). On the Lumia 800, this means single spatial stream 802.11b/g/n connectivity only on the 2.4 GHz band.
Regardless, WiFi range on the Lumia 800 is totally par for the current generation of devices. In addition, WP7.5 continues to do a great job at deciding when to hand off and back onto WiFi when leaving the coverage radius of your house. It’s the small things like these that (to me at least) really demarcate the previous generation of smartphone OSes from the new breed. Unfortunately, in our throughput test which consists of loading a 100 MB PDF hosted locally on an 802.11n network, the Lumia 800 isn’t quite up to the speed of other BCM4329 devices. I’d wager this has more to do with the OS than anything else, though running network throughput applications on the Lumia 800 also gave a similar number to our normal PDF download test.
I should also note that WP7.5 also includes the ability to connect to WiFi APs that don’t broadcast their SSID. There’s a tab under Advanced in WiFi that now allows you to enter all that information and connect away, this wasn’t possible until Mango.
Speakerphone
In calls, the speakerphone on the Lumia 800 is honestly a bit too quiet, and our testing with a sound level data logger backs this up. Even at absolute maximum (where we test, of course) I found the sound level inadequate while using Nokia Drive or placing calls. It isn’t so much the position of the speaker at the bottom that’s a problem (in fact this is a good place to locate it), it’s just not loud enough.
Hopefully, this can be addressed with some software tweaking of the gains for speakerphone volume.
I also recorded some call quality test samples on the Lumia 800. The smartphone also does have the multiple microphone system for common mode noise rejection, though I'm not certain whose IP is being leveraged - perhaps Qualcomm's Fluence?
Noise rejection on the Lumia 800 is very good at all but the most extreme volume levels. Still, there are handsets that can completely reject the ambient noise that you hear at our maximum volume level. Unless you're in an absurdly loud environment, chances are the Lumia 800 will do a good job rejecting noise common between the two microphone system.
GPS
The Lumia 800 uses the GPS/GLONASS (GNSS) system onboard MSM8255 which we’ve seen numerous times before. Though WP7 doesn’t have API access to NMEA data so we can see SNR from individual satellites, the Lumia 800 does seem to get a GPS lock speedily enough even in some tough environments. In both the maps application and Nokia Drive I had no issues getting a GPS lock in under a 5 seconds keeping the lock for the duration of navigation.
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Iketh - Wednesday, January 4, 2012 - link
You can't watch youtube videos without the app on WP. If you try, the website instructs you to download the youtube app first. You can browse youtube all you want, just can't play the videos. The way the site words this almost makes it sound like it's youtube's fault, but I wouldn't know.melgross - Wednesday, January 4, 2012 - link
So, this is a fairly mediocre phone as far as performance goes, but the reviewer really wants to believe it to be better than it is.It's pretty obvious that WP7+ needs a dual core SoC, with a much better GPU. When that happens, we'll see a phone that can properly compare to the other top phones on other OS's, such as Android and iOS. Until then, no excuses can fix the slow nature of this model. If this were a cheaper, lower end model, it might be worthwhile, but for the flagship model, it's simply not worth it.
And then, AMOLED isn't really ready for prime time. Despite the propaganda from the manufacturers who use them, I've not yet seen a review of an AMOLED device that was more than about half as bright as a good LCD model, and often no better than a third as bright. This one seems poor. To say that it seems brighter than it can possibly be, is nonsense.
I hope that we will see much better phones than this one during the year, and soon. If not, it will be another reason why WP7 will struggle.
Brian Klug - Wednesday, January 4, 2012 - link
I'd agree with that assertion - WP7 does need to make the move to dual core, (and will make the move to dual core) if nothing else to get all the other features that come with it. I touched on this a little, but better encoders, better decoders, and on the QCT side better baseband all come on the high-end before eventually showing up on the midrange.The other curious thing is that AMOLED can actually go way brighter (with some of Supercurio's hacks, you can drive the SGS2 SAMOLED Plus display up past 500 nits) but you end up just burning through battery. Obviously there's still some balancing being done by OEMs to keep battery from being totally depleted.
-Brian
melgross - Wednesday, January 4, 2012 - link
There are several very good reasons why AMOLEDs aren't bright. LED's of all kinds, but especially OLED'S, are very constrained by temperature. The higher they are driven, the hotter they get. The hotter they get, the shorter the life. Driving an AMOLED screen to the brightness of the 4S, for example, would bring the lifetime down to less than a quarter of what it is now.In addition, this isn't a linear relationship. More voltage results in less than a 1:1 relationship in brightness, and an even worse relationship when looking at current draw. There's a good reason why UI's designed for AMOLED's use a great deal of black with thin lettering. On average, right now, even the best AMOLEDs use more current than do most LCDs with high efficiency LED backlighting. I find it amusing when I read that AMOLEDs use less energy, when they use more.
I have a lot of LED's here, up to 200 watts (for a single LED). I've yet to find one that lives up to its promise, though they're getting better. I would give AMOLED's at least another two years, and with IGZO displays coming out, possibly another four years until they equal the efficiency.
Color quality, which is poor, is another question altogether.
french toast - Thursday, January 5, 2012 - link
AMOLEDs typically dont come half as bright as the brightest lcds, hell the nokia 701 gets over 1000nits brightness!! so thats 5 times brighter than this model.However brightness tests like this rarely carry through to real life,especially when talking about AMOLEDS, they have the best contrast ratio as well as saturated colours which make the screen pop, you never read a review about an AMOLED phone and get complaints about it being dull..quite the contrary the AMOLED always seems to be brighter..
If brian hadnt ran that test, he wouldnt have mentioned that the screen seems dull.
Some of the appeal of AMOLEDS is that over saturated colour profile, which seems to be a marmite issue, half the people prefer IPS LCD and half swear by a decent RGB AMOLED.
AMOLEDS have many advantages over LCD though, they are thinner, much much better contrast, far far superior response time, more eye popping colours and better power levels when watching dark seens like movies...The sunlight issue which was the worse complaint has disapeared.
One of the biggest complaints about AMOLED compared to a high quality LCD is color accuracy..BUT although this is a bug for some,
most people PREFER the saturated colors, indeed when i read reviews on you tube of people comparing the most accurate hd phone display yet..the IH-IPS display on the LG Nitro the reviewers said they much prefered the nexus display, and that somehow it gave the impression of being BRIGHTER..despite what these tests say.
Spivonious - Wednesday, January 4, 2012 - link
Slow nature of this model? I have one of the launch WP7 phones (LG Quantum), and experience no slowness. The fact is that MS has optimized the OS to perform on a single-core CPU. The phone OEMs are free to add an improved GPU, but there's no need for it. Javascript benchmarks are meaningless to me. Who browses the web for any amount of time on a 4" screen?melgross - Wednesday, January 4, 2012 - link
Just read the tests. It's all there. Sometimes something doesn't feel as slow, or as fast as it is, but the numbers don't lie.465thGTG - Wednesday, January 4, 2012 - link
I'll take real world feel over benchmark numbers any day. My Titan feels faster and more fluid than my Galaxy S II. What else is there to say?doubledeej - Thursday, January 5, 2012 - link
If someone spent all day every day running Javascript, I might agree with you. But so little of the time spent using the phone is spent doing that. Everything else about the phone feels much faster than ANY Android model, regardless of CPU speed or number of cores. Having everything be GPU accelerated makes a world of difference in how fast it feels.You just never wait for anything other than your data connection on these phones.
doobydoo - Saturday, January 7, 2012 - link
I've never tried the Titan, but your reasoning is exactly why the iPhone 4S feels faster than the Galaxy S2 too - the GPU hardware acceleration.That and the fact it has the fastest CPU/GPU combination of any phone ever made.