NOKIA Lumia 800 & 710

Sweet looking phones, if I can get my hands on one I'll do a hands on write up.

NOKIA Lumia 800

http://www.nokia.co.uk/gb-en/products/phone/lumia800/

NOKIA Lumia 710

http://www.nokia.co.uk/gb-en/products/phone/lumia710/

NOKIA have also released some marketing videos around MANGO functionality:

http://rd3d2.wordpress.com/2011/10/26/nokia-lumia-800-710-videos/

You can watch the keynote on demand from here: http://events.nokia.com/nokiaworld/

I guess this is like a second launch of Windows Phone? 

Maybe they will get it right this time ...

The 800 looks nice, but for my next phone I really want a front-facing camera. I'll stick with my HTC HD 7 for now and see what comes early next year.

All this does is make the HTC Radar look good (compared to the 800):

 - No front facing camera
 - Smaller battery
 - Smaller screen
 - 1/3 more expensive

It is fine. But yet a little disappointing at the same time. I think the price is the biggest disappointment.

Yes they are a disappointment.   I will not wait till early 2012 for these.  Nokia is done for and Samsung and HTC will take over soon.   I was hoping for something original.

I was hoping for something original.

I'm not sure anything original has happened in the mobile phone market for about three years. Yes, better everything every six months, but nothing innovative.

To be honest I think the Galaxy Nexus with its LED notification light and "face to unlock" are more exciting than anything Nokia had to show.

If Nokia had released this six months ago it would have been seen as much more interesting.

@reply to post: (TomboRombo) :  Well there's only so much 'original' you can do when MS has a fairly tight hardware requirement spec.  I think Nokia are trading on their reputation for well-built hardware, rather than on doing anything special that no-one else does.  Whether that's the right strategy is another matter.

Herbie

Wow. That was supposed to inspire people to take another look at WP? It's an also-ran phone on an also-ran OS. While the navigation is great they are just filling a whoafully big whole that surprisingly  Microsoft felt wasn't an issue with 7.0 or 7.5. With LTE phones coming out now and no roadmap from Microsoft on when support for it will exist (read 6 - 12 months away) WP is done for.

Now wasn't the rumor that after the Kin debacle that Balmer was doomed if WP didn't take off? How many chances is the board going to give this guy?

It just pisses me off to no end on how incompetent Microsoft's is. No vision. No sense of reality. No sense of urgency.

Edit: changed "maps" to "navigation" so you Microsoft appologists don't get your undies in a bunch.

@DeathBy​VisualStudio:   

That seems a little harsh. While I think today's announcement by Nokia is disappointing I don't think it is the "end of the world" kind of scenario like you're making it out to be.

If anything the Mango update and Skype were the two biggest missing pieces of the WP7 jigsaw. Hopefully Microsoft will roll out Skype by Christmas. Windows 8 will be a further positive shot in the arm (with similar UI style and likely better integration and cloud services).

I think Microsoft's gains in this space will be slow and gradual but frankly the future looks bright given how similar the iPhone and Android are. Android ultimately boils down to a poor man's iPhone, same UI arrangement, same features, same concepts. So the market is: "iPhone-like device or WP7."

I keep hearing about LTE but it is silly. Barely any network supports it and very few normal (non-geek) users even know or care about it. Given that people replace their phones every three to four years, it doesn't make sense to me for this generation of phones to support LTE. We're at least two years away from that.

I will agree that Microsoft often lacks a vision. They seem from an outsider's perspective to just kind of do random things and see what works. For now, even with a poor vision for the future, WP7 is "fine." It isn't an iPhone and it likely won't be.

The 710 looks nice, especially with that blue cover. Hopefully it comes to the U.S. soon and is under $300.

I was hoping for a cheap WP7 option (<$200) to compete with the cheap Android phones (e.g. T-Mobile Comet (Huawei), Samsung Dart, Samsung Gravity). Maybe the launch phones will drop to that price early next year.

Every review I've read says Mango is great and fills in the missing pieces in WP7. All we need now are some killer phones and some advertising to get people talking about it.

edit: About LTE - coverage areas are small in the U.S., but it's something that sells phones. Coverage will only get better, so why not support it in the hardware?

http://www.engadget.com/2011/10/26/nokia-lumia-800-vs-nokia-n9-the-tale-of-the-tape/

It's pretty obvious that Nokia is holding something back for 2012. I've been reading about rumors of a large-size flagship model called the "Ace" that's supposed to come out in a few months.

Still, the Lumia 800 holds its own against most of the newest mid-range Windows Phones that have been released recently. On specs, I would consider the 800 the highest-end of the mid-range Windows Phones, and it's certainly the most physically stunning out of all Windows Phones models.

Still, the Lumia 800 holds its own against most of the newest mid-range Windows Phones

That's nonsense, the 800 is priced HIGHER than the Titan or Focus S which they're excluding from their comparison for being "too high-end." What they decide to compare and ignore is also highly suspect (and their mistake on the "Graphics" line is just amusing).  

That's a bias table. Very difficult to take it seriously.

The 800 looks really nice but where's the front facing camera?
It's strange that we haven't seen Skype for WP7.5 yet.

28 minutes ago, dentaku wrote

The 800 looks really nice but where's the front facing camera?
It's strange that we haven't seen Skype for WP7.5 yet.

I don't believe there is even a beta or prototypical Skype for WP in existence:

• The current WP API set means that Skype for WP would be almost-impossible to develop.
  • Multitasking, real-time camera and microphone feed, clear API support for multiple cameras
• Microsoft got into bed with both the OEMs and the carrier for WP. The carriers won't want Skype, so I imagine Microsoft will do anything to keep them happy.
• Skype was only recently acquired by Microsoft.
• The CLR requirement means that Skype would have to rewrite a client from scratch - not an attractive proposition.
• Chicken and Egg: if no WP phones have front-facing cameras, why bother developing for them?

Given there is a Microsoft Lync client for WP, and that Microsoft seems to want to combine Skype and Lync together (and probably throw WLM in the mix too) it wouldn't surprise me if they just rebranded Lync as Skype and did some back-end federation work to ensure everything worked together.

Also there is no NFC on these phones.  So another delay on a good technology I was hoping to use on some phone applications.   As far as skype goes I am sure they are busy getting skype integrated into a phone application.  They would have to be pretty stupid to spend 8+ billion and not do something cool with skype.

@reply to post: Microsoft won't hamstring the apps that are built into the OS with the same requirements that they place on ordinary third-parties. They can obviously break their own rules especially since they're known to give some third-parties special access to the OS.

6 minutes ago, TomboRombo wrote

Also there is no NFC on these phones.  So another delay on a good technology I was hoping to use on some phone applications.   As far as skype goes I am sure they are busy getting skype integrated into a phone application.  They would have to be pretty stupid to spend 8+ billion and not do something cool with skype.

Actually, I can understand them not going with NFC for the same reasons Apple didn't: there are different standards and NFC still isn't widely supported in real-life (chicken 'n' egg again?). Also, where is support within WP for NFC?

@reply to post: They did announce Skype for WP7 back at MIX in April -- they didn't give a deadline, but they definitely tied it to Mango. Perhaps it's just been harder than they thought ...

Herbie