At its Nokia World conference in London, Nokia took the wraps off the Lumia 800 and Lumia 710 — its first phones using the Windows Phone operating system. The Lumia 800 features several of the premium features found in the Nokia N9 — machined polycarbonate body, Carl Zeiss lens, 3.7-inch ClearBlack AMOLED display, etc. The Lumia 710 features some of the same internals as its sister phone, but cuts several corners in order to hit the budget market.
I already posted several images of the Lumia 800 and Lumia 710. Now here’s some official information:
The stunningly social Nokia Lumia 800 features head-turning design, vivid colors (cyan, magenta and black) and the best social and Internet performance, with one-touch social network access, easy grouping of contacts, integrated communication threads and Internet Explorer 9. It features a 3.7 inch AMOLED ClearBlack curved display blending seamlessly into the reduced body design, and a 1.4 GHz processor with hardware acceleration and a graphics processor. The Nokia Lumia 800 contains an instant-share camera experience based on leading Carl Zeiss optics, HD video playback, 16GB of internal user memory and 25GB of free SkyDrive storage for storing images and music.
The purposely built, no-nonsense Nokia Lumia 710 can be personalized with exchangeable back covers and thousands of apps to bring the Lumia experience to more people around the world. The Nokia Lumia 710 is designed for instant social & image sharing, and the best browsing experience with IE9. It is available in black and white with black, white, cyan, fuchsia and yellow back covers. With the same 1.4 GHz processor, hardware acceleration and graphics processor as the Nokia Lumia 800, the Nokia Lumia 710 delivers high performance at an affordable price.
The good news for Windows Phone fans is that the operating system finally gets a phone with a premium design. The Lumia 800 is just stunning. Apple and Nokia are just so much better at industrial design than everyone else. The bad news for Americans is that the Lumia line won’t be available until 2012. The phones hit France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK in November 2011. This will be followed by launches in Hong Kong, India, Russia, Singapore, and Taiwan before the end of 2011.
Some tech enthusiasts were disappointed that Nokia didn’t include a more powerful chip for the Lumia 800, wishing for a dual-core processor from Nvidia, Samsung, or Texas Instruments. These people are misinformed (or stupid). The Windows Phone operating system isn’t able to take advantage of dual-core processors yet. When the software is updated, I’m sure Nokia will have models with updated processors. Additionally, Microsoft is retaining Qualcomm as the official processor supplier of Windows Phone in order to help avoid the numerous development issues found on Google Android (with its vast permutations of hardware configurations).
The Nokia 800 looks like a hot piece of hardware — easily the Windows Phone I’m most interested in. That said, the operating system isn’t for me. Windows Phone has several slick features, but my heavy use of Google products (multiple Gmail accounts, Google Voice, Google Docs, etc.) makes Android a better choice for work. While the Xbox Live features of Windows Phone are neat, iOS is still a much better choice for entertainment. Still…awesome Nokia hardware with a modern operating system is awfully tempting.
Any of you interested in these phones? Would any of you import a Nokia Lumia 800 for use in America?
