Nokia Lumia 800 review (comparing with HTC desire HD)
In conclusion, this is a critical review of Noka Lumia 800. The phone is beautiful and sexy, but lacks proper functionality in comparison with what else is available on the market.
A frame of reference is the smartphone used prior to Nokia Lumia 800, which is one year older and was purchased at a similar price, why better quality should reasonably be expected on Nokia Lumia 800. The older phone is HTC desire HD.
The hardware UI* is not logical in terms of physical buttons. There are 4 buttons identical in size on the right hand side, lacking visual and physical distinction from each other. This creates confusion as to which button to use when and the buttons are stupidly placed so that if the phone is held upside down, the button on top switches place with the lowest placed button.
The web browser Internet explorer, which comes with Windows mobile OS* in this phone, lacks basic functionality. PDF files which can be read and downloaded on the older HTC phone displays an error on Lumia 800. An example when this becomes a real problem is when expecting this "smart" phone to support the ability of using an electronic boarding pass. (Was tested with KLM and SAS, which works fine on the older HTC phone as well as an even older iPad.)
While on other smartphones sliding a finger on the touchscreen has been incorporated into the OS, this is not the case on this newest version of Windows mobile. Instead, the user is forced to click on small arrows on the touchscreen (example on home screen) which makes for a poor user experience.
Popular applications that are available on other competitive OS's, such as Android and iOS are either of poor functionality or not even available. Examples: Skype, Facebook.
When entering an email address, Windows mobile won't make required symbols or phrases such as "@" and ".com" directly available despite Android and iOS having made this functionality available 1+ year ago. This is poor, considering how many times users are asked to fill out email addresses online.
There is no "pinch and zoom" functionality. Combined with the application icons being very large in comparance with competitive OS's, the home screen does not have much space without having to scroll, to directly access apps. The permanent search key unfortunately only leads to a Bing search, which requires Internet access and despite having a connection usually is inefficient compared to e.g. Google.
Despite Nokia phones' reputation of good cameras, the quality and ability of the camera included, in comparance with the HTC desire HD, is hardly usable lacking perfect light conditions.
Regardless of whether starting up the phone, or an app, it runs slow in comparance with other devices.
When multitasking, the phone can hold a few applications open by holding the left arrow in the bottom left corner. If you open an application and want to close it temporarily, it does however not save any files to enable faster startup the next time.
Most apps are very slow in loading, in general.
Conclusively, despite having been very happy with Nokia 3510 series 15 years ago or so, Nokia fails to impress me with their new phone. Maybe it is Microsofts dirty OS that is the main problem, but I can still not recommend anyone to buy a Lumia 800.
