Nokia yesterday launched their Lumia series phones which runs on Windows Phone 7 operating system, in India. I was invited at the launch event in Delhi where Nokia India MD, D ShivaKumar and Microsoft India, Chairman, Bhaskar Pramanik unveiled Nokia’s Windows Phone 7 devices.
Lets start with the build quality of the devices. Nokia Lumia 800 has a great uni-body design with display embedded in it. The phones fits perfectly in hand and looks great. The floating glass display is something that catches your eyes the first time you look at it. The Windows Phone OS tiles appears to be floating on the surface. Nokia is claiming that the display is used first time ever in any of the mobile devices till date. But Nokia Lumia710, the cheaper version of the Lumia 800, has a plastic body but feels pretty solid. These devices are available in black, magenta,white and cyan.
Now the Windows Phone 7 OS which impressed me a lot. After 2-3 minutes I felt like using my own phone since the user interface is very easy with the tiles it has. You can have a tile on the home screen for anything you like such as your email account, social networking account, favorite app etc. You can sync all your email, Facebook, twitter accounts in seconds. It pulls all your Facebook images, information into the deice as soon as you log-into your account.
Next I tested its Navigation feature known as the Nokia Drive, in Delhi. It uses Nokia Maps which are available in 2D and 3D both. The maps are available on the application marketplace so that you can download them before roaming around in a city which might help you in saving your 3G data. I must say the 3D maps work really well and are very accurate. The turn by turn voice navigation is something which impressed me a lot. Not only it calculates your distance and route from the destination but it also tells you the speed with which you are moving which has a decent accuracy level as well. It also supports many local languages for the voice navigation. I tested it with Hindi and it worked as smoothly as English.
The 3G connectivity is something worth mentioning. We were given Airtel connections with the device with 3G data plans. The upload and download rates were pretty good. We tested its location services with the help of applications such Foursquare, twitter and Facebook by checking-in at various spots in Delhi and their was nothing to complain about the same.
Lumia 800 has a 8-megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash. The picture quality was as expected great but there was no front facing camera. I don’t understand why companies drop the front facing camera in high-end smartphones.
The battery backup was pretty impressive as it worked for about four hours non-stop with WiFi, 3G, GPS turned on the whole time. The speakers sounded good as well though I couldn’t test it properly due to time constraints.
And now some things which I didn’t like and want the manufacturers to work upon. First I couldn’t see any notification bar where it shows the network operator, data packet being used. No shortcut was there to turn on/off things like WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS. Though there is a notification bar at the top but it shows only the things like the battery icon, signal strength, silent mode. We also faced some issues while uploading twitpics on some of the Lumia handsets our group had.
Hardware Specifications Lumia 800
•Networks: WCDMA 850/900/1900/2100, GSM/EDGE 850/900/1800/1900
•Speed: HSDPA cat 10: 14.4 Mbps, HSUPA cat 6: 5.76 Mbps
•Display: 3.7” WVGA (800×480) AMOLED capacitive touch ClearBlack display with pinch zoom, 2.5D curved glass seamlessly integrated to unibody
•OS: Windows Phone Release – Mango
•Memory: 16GB internal user memory, 512MB program memory
•Camera: 8Mpix auto-focus Carl Zeiss, LED flash, Video capturing MPEG-4 720p @ 30 fps
•Size/Weight: 116.5 mm x 61.2 mm x 12.1 mm (LxWxT) / 76.08 cc / 142 g
•Connectivity: WLAN 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1, A-GPS, micro-USB connector and charging, 3.5mm AHJ connector, Accelerometer, Proximity, Magnetometer, ALS
•Processor: 1.4 Ghz Single Core MSM8255 (WCDMA)
•Audio: MP3 player, Audio jack: 3.5mm, Supported codecs: mp3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, m42, m4b, wma, EVRC, QCELP
•Battery: 1450 mAh
Hardware Specifications Lumia 710
•Networks: WCDMA 900/1900/2100, GSM/EDGE 850/900/1800/1900
•Speed: HSDPA cat 10: 14.4 Mbps, HSUPA cat 6: 5.76 Mbps
•Display: 3.7” WVGA (800×480) TFT capacitive touch ClearBlackTM display with pinch zoom
•OS: Windows Phone 7.5 – Mango
•Memory: 512MB RAM, 8GB storage
•Camera: 5Mpix auto-focus, LED flash, Video capturing MPEG-4 720p @ 30 fps
•Size/Weight: 119mm x 62.4mm x 12.5mm (LxWxT) / 81.1cc / 125.5g
•Connectivity: WLAN 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1, A-GPS, micro-USB connector and charging, 3.5mm AHJ connector
•Processor: 1.4 Ghz Single Core MSM8255
•Audio: MP3 player, Audio jack: 3.5mm, Supported codecs incl.: mp3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, wma
•Battery: 1300 mAh
Nokia Lumia 710, 810 prices in India
The prices were not declared officially but as per our estimate it would be:
- Nokia Lumia 710 – 19,000 INR
- Nokia Lumia 800- 29,000 INR
Well as a whole the device scores well as far as design, functionality and features are concerned. I don’t know if Windows Phone OS can run on budget hardware models but if it can then Nokia can definitely try to hit that area which might help the company gain its market share which it has lost to Samsung, in Asia. Hope to see some more great handsets like these on Windows Phone OS by Nokia in near future.
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Nokia Lumia phones are a bit costly as compare to other phones and it has an lot of advantages in it. And, these devices are available in different colors. Thanks a lot for given up here