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28th Oct 2011

Want One: Nokia Lumia 800 & 710

Don't call it a comeback. No really, it's tough early to tell if Nokia Lumia 800 or 710 can take on the smartphone market, but they do show promise.

JOE

Don’t call it a comeback. No really, it’s tough early to tell if Nokia Lumia 800 or 710 can take on the smartphone market, but they do show promise.

By Leo Stiles

Nokia CEO Steven Elop took to the stage in London this week to unveil the Lumia 800 and 710 smartphones; the first two handsets to come out of their partnership with Microsoft and we have to say that they are looking like winners.

By the way, that sound you can hear is a collective sigh of relief from Nokia’s shareholders

Lumia 800

Of the two phones, it is the Lumia 800 that is likely to cause the biggest stir as it shares much in common with the excellent N9, with a sleek polycarbonite shell and bright metallic finish. Handset design has always been Nokia’s strongest suit but it’s whats inside that makes us think that the Finnish giant has finally got its act together.

Underneath that sleek exterior, the Lumia 800 is packing a 1.4GHz CPU that powers the 3.7-inch Clear Black AMOLED screen. Elsewhere the phone house the de rigueur 8 megapixel camera at the rear but looking closer reveals a Cal Zeiss lens and an aperture of f2.2, making the phone well suited to shooting in low light conditions.

Storage is adequate at 16GB but that’s it, as there is support for micro SD cards. However, every Lumia 800 comes with 25GB of cloud storage courtesy of Microsoft’s SkyDrive.

Nokia are talking up the Lumia 800 as “the world’s first real Windows Phone,” which is a bold claim from a company that hasn’t exactly been producing stellar phones of late. However, the Lumia is getting the very latest version of the Windows Phone OS called Mango and with most of their competitors embracing Android for the most part, Nokia does seem to be going all-in.

Facebook, MS Office, ESPN Sports and Xbox Live are all baked into the phone’s OS and Nokia also has music, video and social hub features to complete the phones ecosystem.

The Lumia 800 has an RRP of €410 and should be hitting our shore sometime next month.

Lumia 710

Nokia didn’t get to be the biggest player in mobile during the noughties by only catering to the high end of the market and they seem to bee seeing a gap in the market for a mid-range Windows Phone with the Lumia 710.

The Lumia 710 might be a scaled back version of its big brother but that doesn’t mean that it is any less powerful, with the 1.4GHz CPU making the transition. Savings have been made on other areas with a regular LCD display replacing the AMOLED one of the Lumia 800. The camera is only 5 megapixels and the on-board storage is down to 8GB.

Thats where the deficit ends, as all the other goodies like Windows Phone Mango, the social and media hubs and the baked-in social media support are all present and correct.

The Lumia 710 is a nice compromise between power and affordability and high end features and much like previous Nokia lines, the colour palate can be varied, through interchangeable facias that characterised some of their most popular handsets from the last ten years.

In keeping with the scaled-down feature set, the Lumia 710 comes with an asking price of €270 which is very affordable as smartphones go and when factoring in operator subsidies, the 710 could well establish itself as a hot and affordable item come Christmas when it launches in Europe.

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