Nokia 800: Most Anticipated Smartphone of The Year is Here!

Nokia 800: Most Anticipated Smartphone of The Year is Here!

With one of the biggest collaboration in the history of the Smartphone industry, Nokia’s first Windows OS smartphone is one of the most anticipated smartphone of the year for sure. The new Nokia 800 Sea Ray is the same handset of Nokia N9 but it is rebooted with Windows 7.5 Mango OS with some minor changes and heavy hardware changes. Following is a detailed review of Nokia 800:

• Screen and Body: The unibody design is made from polycarbonate which is hard as well as light at the same time (Nokia calls it “single piece injection molded polycarbonate shell.”) The device only weighs 142g.  There are the touch buttons at the bottom of the screen for going back, going back directly to the main menu and last is for searching. An addition to the existing N9 body is that there is a camera shutter button at the bottom right of the edge of the body. The body of Nokia 800 is only 0.48 inches thick. The screen of this phone just awesome and almost same as the Nokia N9. The screen is of 3.7 inches with 16M colour and has a screen resolution of 480×800(251ppi). Beside the AMOLED touchscreen, the Nokia 800 is also packed with ClearBlack display which gives superb detailing and by far one of the darkest black colour. Similar to Nokia N9 the screen is also coated with a special Anti-Glare Polarizer. The only problem in the body is that the camera has a metallic finish and it gets scratches if used roughly which should be corrected in final version.

• Hardware & Camera: The Nokia 800 comes with a solid hardware support well above the minimum requirements of Windows 7.5 Mango. The phone comes with a 1.4 GHz! Scorpion S2 processor which is huge as 1.4 GHz for a pocket shaped Smartphone is amazing. Nokia 800 also comes with Adreno 205 GPU & Qualcomm MSM8255 Snapdragon chipset also, with 3D hardware graphic acceleration. As you can see the processor of Nokia 800 is significantly upgraded as compared to the Nokia N9. A disappointment in the hardware part is that the Nokia 800 has only 512MB of RAM(Most of the latest smartphone contain 1GB of RAM including the earlier Nokia N9). One of the most disappointing as well as shocking thing is that the Nokia 800 doesn’t have NFC (Near Field Communicator)! Whereas the earlier Nokia N9 was having NFC technology. Also another Con in the hardware part is that Nokia 800 comes with a 16GB onboard memory. I know 16GB is enough but since there are no card slots in the unibody design Nokia should have given at least 32GB onboard memory (Nokia N9 came with two options 32GB & 64GB). The 8MP dual LED flash camera of Nokia 800 clicks pictures at 3264×2448 pixels also it has auto focus so you can take close pictures with detailing as well. The 8MP Carl Zeiss captures 720p videos at 30 FPS.

• Operating System (OS) & User Interface (UI): The latest Microsoft Windows Mango OS is pretty unique as in many of the other OS have more or less features which are inspired from iOS or Android. But this new OS is really very unique and has a style of its own. May be that’s the reason Microsoft has used the same live tiles style in upcoming Windows 8 and Xbox. Similar to iPhone the OS doesn’t have homescreen but instead a pretty clean looking Metro style menu which makes UI pretty tidy. The live tiles are very clean, cool and look amazing. In the UI there are different hubs instead of individual apps where all the related things are converged. For example in the people’s hub there all the things about people starting from contacts till facebook and twitter live feed. There many new features in the Windows Mango OS. In messaging hub you can’t just send and receive SMSs and emails but you can chat online on facebook which is very unique, convenient as you don’t have to download a facebook chatting app and cool all at the same time. Also because of the minimum requirement of 1GHz processor to run this OS the performance is meant to be fast. In the pictures hub you get photos taken from your mobile phone’s camera and from your facebook account as well! So in the new Mango OS all the things facebook, twitter and MSN are merged together quite beautifully. The app market of the new OS is also quite impressive. You get a trial version for almost all the premium apps, the only Con in the app market is that the premium apps are a bit too expensive (can’t understand why?). Nokia 800 comes with exclusive goodies such as free 25GB SkyDrive cloud storage, Nokia Drive turn-by-turn voice navigation free app and Nokia Music with Mix Radio. Another exclusive feature is the Xbox Live tile which is well not available in any of the other OS. In this you can create your own avatar, read about upcoming games, add different members of Xbox live and many more. The Nokia 800 comes with Internet Explorer 9 which supports HTML5. The search feature of the OS is also very interesting in search there are options whether you want to search local, Image, Sound or Document. For example if you want to search a photo in your memory or a barcode just select the image search option, camera will turn on and as soon as you keep the image or barcode in front of the camera it starts to show the results, cool isn’t it? The Lithium ion 1450mAh battery gives a standby time of 265hours (2G) & 335hours (3G) also 13hours and 9hours 30min talktime on 2G and 3G respectively which is pretty satisfying.  Overall the new Windows Mango OS is solid and unique from rest of all.

The Nokia 800 ships in vibrant colours such as Black, Cyan and Magenta similar to N9 which look pretty amazing. The price of the Nokia 800 is expected to be Rs. 28,000 to Rs. 30,000. Nokia 800 is expected to be released by December in India. The decrease in the price as compared to N9 is may be due to lack of NFC, half the RAM that of N9 and only 16GB onboard memory. Windows mobile OS is very small as compared to giants like iOS and Android so it would very interesting to see how things unfold in the coming year.