Nokia Lumia 800: sexy, but can it beat the iPhone?
Dan Seitz 
Imagine, if you will, Mike Tyson and Chuck Liddell sitting on Justin Bieber’s chest and doing their level best to punch through his crotch right into the ground. Imagine them just really whaling on the Biebs, pounding him right into the alto range. Nokia is the Justin Bieber of this analogy, with Apple and Google serving as Tyson and the Iceman.
Nokia is hoping to turn this four-year festival of crotch-punching around with the Lumia, its dive into the smartphone market. And it actually looks like it might have a chance.
The Lumia is its new flagship, a $585 phone (without carrier subsidies, so don’t worry; you won’t actually be paying that much) built around Windows Phone Mango. Here’s our breakout of what’s useful, what’s neat, and what’s nothing special.
Useful:
- Free voice-activated GPS navigation. Yep, completely free. This thing will replace your dash GPS.
- 16 GB of onboard memory backed by 25 GB of cloud storage, making this a phone you can actually haul stuff around on.
- The camera is built around shooting in low-light and other challenging environments, meaning your phone pictures will come out OK for once.
- 1.4 Ghz processor with hardware acceleration and graphics processing: i.e. it’s a pretty powerful phone.
- Quad-band GSM means it’ll work just about anywhere.
Neat:
- ESPN comes standard on the OS; no downloading some annoying app, just its annoying updates!
- Gigfinder, an app that comes preloaded and lets you find local live music.
- A social media stream that just incorporates everything instead of forcing you to log into three different apps to check three different streams. Of course, how they’ll avoid the Facebook/Twitter redundancy problem, or keep it from being overwhelming to anybody with more than five friends, is anybody’s guess.
Big Whoop:
- Nokia’s music apps aside from Gigfinder. Did we really need ANOTHER MP3 buying/online radio service? We know it’s obligatory, but really, guys, Apple and Amazon kinda have this market all sewn up. Let it go.
Verdict:
This is competitive with other smartphones and might keep Nokia from taking any more shots to the daddy bags. It should be coming to the US in early 2012: check it out when it arrives and see what you think.
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