Nokia pedigree with Microsoft smarts – a fine matchup

MICROSOFT and Nokia have struggled to tap into the booming smartphone market. The Nokia Lumia 800 – combining Nokia’s hardware pedigree with Microsoft’s software smarts – is supposed to be their comeback kid, and it doesn’t disappoint.

The Nokia Lumia 800 hardware is pretty much identical to the N9 – one of the most stylish and sleek phones I’ve seen in a long time.

It’s got a curved polycarbonate body and a curved 3.7-inch touchscreen that delivers sharp and vivid images and text, with Clearblack and Gorilla Glass technology for easier viewing outdoors and scratch-resistance. As well as classic black, the Lumia 800 is available in blue and glossy white.

The eight-megapixel camera has a handy touch-to-focus function and takes nice if not brilliant pics. It has a dedicated, rather than touch, shutter button and records high-definition 720p video.

Memory is capped at 16 gigabytes – there is no SD card slot – and it has 512 megabytes of Ram – on a par with other high end smartphones.

With a 1.4-gigahertz single-core processor, it’s not the fastest phone about, but performance is fairly smooth and snappy.

Windows Phone smartphones have so far been relatively thin on the ground, but the operating system (in this case Windows Phone 7.5 or Mango) has some real drawcards.

The homescreen is a customisable and handy menu of live tiles representing your most-used apps, which alert you to new activity such as new email and Facebook updates. There’s also a ‘‘People’’ tile that lets you seamlessly communicate with contacts through different applications such as text, Facebook and email.

The phone integrates with a swag of Microsoft online services – Hotmail, Microsoft Office, the online gaming hub Xbox Live, the native search engine Bing and document storage service

Skydrive is a smooth experience. Also included is a Zune music app, for listening to music and watching content from the Zune store.

There are about 60,000 apps available through the Windows Marketplace, compared to upwards of half a million available for its Apple and Android rivals, although Nokia says those 60,000 include 90 per cent of the most popular apps.

Nokia sweetens the app offering, including its Nokia Maps and Nokia Drive (for GPS car navigation) apps for free.

Battery life is fair, lasting about a day and a bit with normal use – synching email and social media apps, web browsing, emailing and a bit of video.

The Lumia 800 is a beautifully made phone with few hardware flaws.