Unboxing the Nokia Lumia 800

Unboxing the Nokia Lumia 800

The Nokia Lumia 800 unboxed!

Unboxing and Initial Impressions: Nokia Lumia 800

One of our guest writers previously did a hands-on article already on the Nokia Lumia 800. It received significant amount of interest so we really did our best to secure a review unit so we can put the phone through the paces ourselves and do more extensive articles about it. I’m happy to report that we already have a unit in hand via Nokia Connects UK! We have the Nokia Lumia 800 for two weeks so expect the full comprehensive review next week. For today though we’d like to share with you our unboxing and initial impressions.

The Nokia Lumia 800 promises to marry the beautiful design of the Nokia N9 with the elegant and robust Windows Phone 7.5 operating system. Let’s see if it delivers.

Packaging and Unboxing

Solid carton box of the Nokia Lumia 800

The Nokia Lumia 800 comes in a solid blue carton box. To open just remove the tape and slide out the internal compartment. What’s the first thing that will greet you? The stunningly gorgeous Nokia Lumia 800. Like what we said during the hands-on, it’s hard not to say “Wow” when you see this device for the first time.

The Lumia 800 unboxed!

In terms of hardware design the Lumia 800 blows a lot of the other equally priced and even more pricier smartphones out of the water! The 3.7-inch curved Gorilla Glass screen with the AMOLED Clear Black Display is nothing short of phenomenal. Your finger glides effortlessly across the screen and the display is very responsive, bright, crisp, and detailed. It also feels solid in your hand — the smooth back combined with the curved display will give you the impression that it’s much more expensive that the price you paid for it.

Front close-up shot of the Nokia Lumia 800

The front of the phone has no physical buttons. You just have the screen and the custom Windows navigation glass keys at the bottom. At the right side you’ll find the volume control, lock/unlock, and a camera button. Just like the N9 the Lumia 800 has the micro-SIM card tray and the micro-USB port at the top covered with the lid. Here are more photos:

View from the top
The side
Nokia logo proudly displayed at the back together with the Carl Zeiss 8 MP camera

Amazing right? It’s even more thrilling when you have this phone right in front of you! Anyway, what else did we find inside the box? We emptied out the contents and here’s what we found:

Manuals, earphones, a hard silicone case matching the color of your Lumia, cable, and the charger.

Let me just say that I appreciate that Nokia is including the case for free with the phone. I think this should be a staple add-on already with any smartphone.

Initial Impressions

Okay now that we’ve talked about how stellar the hardware is let’s go into the software. The Nokia Lumia 800 has Windows Phone 7.5 which is considered “uncharted waters” by a lot of tech pundits and gadgeteers. I’ve been playing around with it for two days now and I can honestly say that Windows has so much potential in the mobile space. Given more time to mature and with more developers creating apps I think Windows Phones can pose a serious challenge to both Android and iOS.

Pleasant to the eyes

Hardware and software have one thing in common -- they're both gorgeous.

Just like the hardware the software is also beautiful. As soon as you open the phone you’re greeted with the Metro style layout using tiles for the core phone functions and apps. These tiles though aren’t just plain boxes with graphics representing the app. They come to life depending on how you set them.

It wasn’t hard for us to settle in with the phone as well. Windows Phone 7.5 has a nifty feature called Contacts Transfer which allows you to easily transfer all of your contacts from your previous phone to the Lumia 800. I had no problems moving over 3,000 contacts from my Galaxy Note to this phone. This beats having to sync everything on the cloud or on your laptop, hehe! If you prefer to sync your contacts via Google though or some other way it’s still available. The Bluetooth sync though is probably something that a lot of people will love.

Reading and sending messages on the Lumia 800 is also a pleasant experience. The font is big, easily readable, and nice to look at. The keyboard is spaced out pretty well and we rarely made mistakes while creating long e-mails or texts.

Twitter on the Lumia 800

Apps?
This is where they should improve on. One thing we learned the hard way is that you shouldn’t select the Philippines as your country when you create your account for the Marketplace. The current PH Marketplace is in dire need of basic social networking apps! We couldn’t even download Facebook, hehe. This is easily remedied though by saying that your country is the United States when you make your account. You get full access to all the good apps (both paid and free).

By the way one thing we noticed is that Microsoft made their own apps for social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Both apps use the style and UI of Metro which makes the experience more holistic. Props to them for spending time and effort in doing this because no smartphone or tablet can really be considered “smart” these days without free solid social networking applications.

Full Review coming soon!

I’ve temporarily stopped using my Galaxy Note as my primary phone to give the Lumia 800 the time and usage it needs to come up with a fair and full review. We have the phone for two weeks but I can probably have the review up in a week. ‘Till then I hope you guys liked our unboxing post! Please do share this on Facebook and Twitter if you did!

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