Sunday 22 April 2012

Nokia Lumia 900 (black, AT&T)




The good: The Nokia Lumia 900's eye-popping unibody design sets a new direction for smartphone style. Its LTE speeds, vivid 4.3-inch screen, and 8-megapixel camera are high points.The bad: Problems with call quality and minor design flaws like some gaps in the construction and weirdly placed buttons get in the way. The designer camera optics are good, but they don't live up to the hype. The phone shoots 720p video rather than 1080p video.The bottom line: The Nokia Lumia 900's unique design and high-end features make Windows Phone look fantastic, and the $99 price is extremely fair. Despite some flaws, this is my favorite Windows Phone yet.Photo gallery:Nokia Lumia 900Nokia sorely needs a "hero" smartphone with the looks, the speeds, the specs, and a price that will hush the doubters. With the Lumia 900, Nokia proves that it has the chops to compete. We thought so at CES, where we awarded it best new smartphone, and I think so now.

Design
If you imagine the cell phone section of a funky, Scandinavian design shop run by avant-garde youths, the Lumia 900 would fit right in. Its lightly sculpted unibody chassis and deliberate use of color scream "lifestyle product." Bold as an exclamation mark, the Lumia 900 has pure pop-art coursing through its electrical veins.



This is the classiest "Smurf" phone you're
 ever going to see
.What makes the Nokia Lumia 900 so eye-catching? Even without the electric blue version that I have, the bright white color arriving April 22, or the more-understated black color, the 900's profile 
stands out. The chassis has a perfectly flat top and bottom, with round sides and a slightly curved back, which Nokia then topped with a large, glossy screen.At 5 inches tall by 2.7 inches wide by 0.45 inch deep, it's a large phone. The smooth, matte finish helps it slide into pockets and purses, but because of the width and flat back, the Lumia 900 did feel a little flat in my hand. However, it was comfortable on the ear. It may feel a bit heavy at 5.6 ounces, but it's also very solid. I'm a little worried about the long-term effect of finger grease and residue on the color, but in the short term, the finish survived my residual hand lotion and the direct application of a goo-gone solution without marring the color.Back in its heyday, Nokia phones were largely synonymous with solid construction and thoughtful -- and sometimes daring -- design. The Lumia 900 may not present a strictly new design, since it's clearly adapted from the Nokia N9 Meego-based phone released in Asia, and the Lumia 800, the European version of the N9 that runs Windows Phone, but it's a good one that offers slight variations.

The smooth body helps it slide into pockets
 Because of its size, the Lumia 900 fits better in my back pocket.For example, the Lumia 900 is larger than the 800 and features a front-facing camera in addition to that all-important LTE and a larger battery. Then there are the more-minor surface variations, which you'd only really notice holding the two phones side by side. On the 800, the display bubbles out about 2.5 millimeters, like the surface tension curving a drop of water. The 900's screen, on the other hand, looks more like a slapped-on postage stamp. My review unit had a few gaps that were barely perceptible, but were there nonetheless. The most obvious was large enough for me to stick my fingernail into the space around the SIM card slot, and pull up a corner of the locked door -- that's sloppy. There was also a thin gap where the right side of the screen meets the body of my review unit, with no gap whatsoever on the left side of the screen.I had no complaints with the display itself, though, and it's easily one of the Lumia 900's key selling points. The beautiful 4.3-inch AMOLED screen features ClearBlack display technology and Gorilla Glass. Colors look richly hued, bright, and sharp. I compared the Lumia 900 with the Samsung Focus S, which has an identical screen size and WVGA resolution (800x480 pixels). In both brightness and richness, the Lumia 900 absolutely blows away the Focus S, which at the time I hailed as a beautiful Super AMOLED Plus screen in its own right. At the same levels of full and automatic brightness, the Lumia 900 shone about a full level brighter than the Focus S.I also compared high-res photos on the two handsets. While they both looked terrific, the Lumia 900 showed noticeably greater contrast, with blacker blacks, more color spectrum variation, and greens so bright they looked a bit unnatural.

Operating system and Nokia apps
Thanks to a close partnership between Nokia and Microsoft, the Lumia 900 runs the most recent iteration of Windows Phone OS, version 7.5 Mango. As a result, the Lumia 900 can perform every software task that other Windows Phones do, too.


Nokia doesn't have much leeway on the 
software side beyond these apps
Unlike Android, Microsoft keeps its OS pretty locked down, so Nokia has little room to add its own flair on the software side, a strategy I appreciate for uniting the phone experience across devices, but one that makes it harder for manufacturers to stand out. Still, Nokia does make a mark with the nice Nokia Blue color theme (it's the Lumia 900 default) and with a suite of Marketplace apps that include Nokia Drive, Nokia Maps, Nokia Transit, and Nokia Contacts Transfer. This section also highlights partners' third-party apps, like ESPN and CNN. It's a shame that the Lumia 900 doesn't have Nokia's music app, Music Mix Radio, like its European counterparts, and I hope the right deals are signed soon. The absent app, which serves streaming radio and creates mixes, is similar to a Windows Phone feature, but it's also an alternative that could give Nokia some additional cred.

Features
Since Windows Phone OS pretty much behaves the same on every handset, it's the extras that are important. LTE was the most crucial feature Nokia needed to sell this phone on our shores, and it'll be one of the first two Windows phones with LTE. (The HTC Titan II, which goes on sale the same day, is the other.)Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth are standards, though sadly, the Lumia 900 ships with Bluetooth 2.1, practically antique compared with the new Bluetooth 4.0 standard we're starting to see in mobile devices.Windows Phone OS handily provides e-mail and social networking integration through account log-ins in the settings, an option for linking inboxes together, and support for group messaging. There's also threaded text and multimedia messaging, and a cool feature that can weave together messages sent between IM and traditional texts. Task-switching, voice search, and scan searches with Bing are also included, as are conference calling and voice dialing. (For even more on Windows Phone OS, read my full Windows Phone 7.5 review.)




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