My Lumia 800

This week I got my new Nokia Lumia 800, a blue one, this makes it easier to find it, as most phones are black. The Lumia has a new micro SIM card, smaller than the normal card, possibly to get rid of older still functioning phones.

The phone looks very nice, feels lightweight after my N900, lies comfortably in my hand and is easy to operate. However, it is definitely different from Symbian or Maemo phones, For starters, the setup is very easy, and actually there are very few things one can change or should change, it just works fine. This might sound difficult to people who love change things, but for the everyday users it is a great improvement. One small example; it takes tens of different parameters to setup the WLAN of our university to get my N7 Nokia (Symbia) on the net, but I needed only to give my username and password for the Lumia. Crystal clear screen, smoothly moving menus and great telephone reception are standard

The first thing I had to do was to transfer my contacts from the old Nokia N900 to the Lumia, this is done using an special contacts transfer application, using Bluetooth, very simple. After this I needed some apps I am used to, GPS, mapping, clock, flashlight etc, all could be found on the Noka marketplace, some are free, some not, but it works fine.

Now to connect the Lumia to a PC, one needs new software, Zune, which is a bit like iTunes for the iPad. Anyway it works, but I am not really crazy about the combination of backup and update features with music and video. I actually liked Ovi Suite, as it is very easy and straightforward.

Now the thing I do not like, on my Nokia N7 I have Nokia Maps with downloadable maps which can be used offline. One can mark favorite locations and synchronize them with the Ovi service. In the Lumia ther is the same Nokia Maps but has no downloadable maps. Nokia Maps in Lumia is more like Google maps or Bing Maps. It is possible to mark favorite locations, but there is no way to import the old (Symbia) locations from the Ovi service. This is something I am very dissatisfied with, and I just would like to see the same functionality as in Symbia Nokia Maps. The Nokia Drive, car Navigation works fine, no problems with that. Maps can be downloaded easily, although I have noticed that some time ago Nokia started to downgrade (made the size smaller) maps, so many smaller forest tracks and dirt roads have been removed, that was a pity as I often need these, but I do understand it, the maps grew too large and it became very slow to download them.

The camera has eight Megapixels, Zeiss optics, standard in many Nokia phones, the results are a bit blurred, and I think there is a problem with shutter speed It seems that I got better results using a fixed ISO (100) value as compared to the automatic value. I compared the results with a Sony pocket digital camera and there was little difference.

As this phone is now in the Microsoft Windows realm it is easy to sync with SkyDrive, it can actually sync pictures on the go. However, I found out that this automatic SkyDrive upload feature does drain the battery really fast if you are in an area with a slow network. But it works and is simple to set up. The same counts for email, very simple and easy to configure.

ISO value 100

Landscape, ISO 100