Market forces
One thing needs a quick fix, though: dialling. It’s actually quite difficult. Unlike more recent iterations of iOS, you can’t fast scroll through the address book alphabetically – at least it looks that way, until you click on a letter and an alphabetical grid appears on-screen with highlighted characters that hint at contacts with those initials. There’s no smart dialling either, unless you consider voice dialling to be reliable enough. The fledgling Marketplace is full of third party add-ons that do the job, but the phone should have both built-in.
Sample Shots
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Click for a full-resolution image
Click for a full-resolution image
The camera was adequate, but seriously underperformed in lower light conditions indoors, producing grainy pictures indoors even in daylight when it should have performed adequately. The specs aren't ground-breaking: dual LED flash, 720p HD at 30fps, although my expectations are always fairly low when faced with a thin device. This is no N8. The dedicated camera button is most welcome, and a half press focuses the camera.
The Lumia 800 boasts two mapping apps, and two music apps, the latter actually being umbrellas for a host of services. You can see the rush to market here.
Marketplace searching has been improved on Mango, but the quality of the comments apps varies significantly
Even after a week I was still confused by the duplication of Zune and Nokia’s own Music suite, which includes gig listings and its Nokia download store. But the Pandora-style Nokia Radio feature, which I disparagingly referred to as a “tickbox feature” at launch, works surprisingly well in practice. You can cache a number of songs locally, if you like them, for a month – and there’s no sign up.
Next page: Early days, then
COMMENTS
So far as it goes not a bad effort
And from the title I was talking about the review not the phone itself.
No comment on the maps from Nokia, how was the GPS signal pickup? Does this phone offer all the current Symbian methods of position determination?
The included headphones and music output as a whole got no mention which greatly disappointed me.
The included case that comes with the phone, worthless POS or actually worth using? Did it make the design issues worse or better for the reviewer? Was it even tried? How hard was it to get on the phone and then take off? Did it add excess bulk?
Charging time? Power consumption of said charger? Both when charging and not.
Design issues. OK you didn't find the design that great and I don't mind a reviewer saying that, but given it's been taken from the N9 nearly in its entirety I would wager that the build quality will be much much better than is hinted at in here. The technology of the screen got very short shrift. I find this baffling when it is of such a cutting edge nature.
Come on El Reg, stop pulling your punches. I come here looking for a review that lets the reader know that the phone has been truly used and abused. This reads like it was borrowed for 24 hours and that the reviewer had several other more important things to be doing at the same time. For a review score of 80% I would of expected much more detail. If you felt that all the phone had to offer was covered then I would of said the score, based on this review, should of been around the 58-62% range.
That's because it's not really a Nokia
The innards and antenna are made by Compal, an off-the-shelf WP7 board (because they are all the same). And the camera is better than the one on the E7, better sensor and not EDoF - low-light performance is bad because you can't do miracles with small-and-thin camera modules after Nokia caught all that flak about the lardness of the N8 camera.
Of course, being Andrew, no mention of how the Maemo6 in the N9 was the modern platform Nokia needed and already had, with an app GRID, letter scroll shortcuts, Skype integration, Opera (which will never be ported to WP7 because of MS rules), and TWO days of battery life (and the N9 is a real Nokia in reception and call quality)
Something grumpy or grudging on every page, inadequate battery life, poor form factor & it still gets 80%. You are easily pleased, aren't you?
Nokia or MS? We know you work for one of them
(body) in the chest freezer
Empty shell compared to the N8
I have played briefly with samples of the 800 & 710 and it has the shiny shiny but no where near the customisable grunt I get from my current device.
Read/write from/to external USB memory being a big one.
Symbian may seem complicated to some but you can really make it do things that other phones just wont. Maybe its just me who like messing with settings & trying things out? FM transmitter too, proper useful.
Maybe the N8 was/is the pinnacle of what a phone can do & its all down hill from here in to the phones for nuggets sphere who like shiny over function, but I sincerly hope not.
Only gripe is that Orange take an age to release OTA updates, but other than that, boss!
Gonna take a lot more to prise me away from S^3
