Nokia Lumia 800 First Impressions

I received my Nokia Lumia 800 Windows phone a couple for weeks ago. Here I'll note a few of my first impressions. I should note that I am not an experienced smartphone user - I have been skipping the whole smartphone experience for various reasons but including the facts that

• The smartphone market was, and is, in a nascent state
• The iPhone was pretty dominant for a while and I am not normally one to go with the current trend, particularly when ...
• I am also not very pro-Apple - the iPhone might well have a good UX … I don’t know, I have little interest in trying it - but I know some other Apple products, e.g. the PC iTunes software, are appalling in this regard.
• And as an IT professional I was aware that the iPhone developer experience is based on legacy technologies and I wanted the option of a decent developer experience on whatever phone I chose.

Then along came Microsoft and at v7.5, or 7.1 of the new Windows Mobile/ Windows Phone OS, depending on whether you believe the marketing or technical departments at Microsoft, which by all reports was becoming more competitive in the marketplace. Add Nokia to the mix and you had better phones and, more importantly, a bigger technical and sales and marketing force behind their new phones, and hence the now not so new OS.

After a few more months the facts above along with deals available for the Lumia 800 became too good for me to refuse, combined with the fact that the rest of the family went away on a skiing holiday giving me time to come to the decision (I'm bad at making purchasing decisions). £400 isn’t far off what I would pay for a laptop after all and I can get work done on a laptop … I wasn't expecting the phone to be much more than an expensive toy. I wasn't completely convinced by the Nokia - there had been worrying user feedback about poor battery life and the inaccessible battery still just seems completely wrong to me, quite possibly in my ignorance. Also peers had suggested there were devices with bigger and better screens available, i.e. the HTC Titan. There was also the Nokia 900 which had just hit the US, though given the time it would take to reach the UK and then the deals start to happen … enough prevaricating. There were pluses too - Nokia had thrown in a couple of their own useful apps for free, notably Nokia Drive. Oh, I should also mention the Lumia 710 which I liked the concept of - a cheaper, more basic phone but with the same processor power as the 800. Except it wasn't cheaper - the deals were actually better for the 800, presumably due to the proximity to its release date, though I would expect the relative pricing levels to settle down and the 710 deals to get better over the next month or two.

So I went with T-Mobile network wise as one of the best deals that was around and as the network coverage checkers suggested slightly better coverage at my home location. The 24month deal came with minimal call/ text allowance … and my presumption was I wouldn't even get near that ... and the contract happened to come with 1.5GB of data per month - I was warned this was likely to be totally over the top as I would be on a wireless network either at home or at work 95% of the time but … hey ho; this was the cheapest option on T-Mobile.

So I say I wasn't a smartphone user … I wasn't really a mobile phone user at all … I had had a short procession of cheap pay as you go phones. The fact that I never got as far as memorising my number meant a new SIM was no issue and gives an indication of the level of usage I got out of these phones. But now paying £25+/month for 24 months I had a very good reason to make sure I used this new phone, included all the extra non phone call related features I didn’t really know why I needed! So I was completely ignorant of this new world but planned to play it by ear, hopefully enjoy the journey and also hopefully not become one of those people I almost ran over every other day whilst cycling because they aren't concentrating sufficiently on their environment, rather something phone related.

First up getting the supplied SIM installed proved more problematic than it should - opening the clip being the problem and brute force unsurprisingly wasn’t the way to go … annoyingly a mark on my brand new device. Of course once you have the knack … no problem. Also there is an errant pixel on the screen, just under the left arrow Window Phone control … insufficient to bother with returning, even if it were allowed, but … grrr.

Physically the phone is bigger and heavier than I was expecting from my position of ignorance. I was immediately happy I hadn't opted for a bigger phone and it didn’t immediately fell comfortable in my relatively small hands. The weight isn’t an issue, in fact in some ways it is reassuring weighty and I suppose there is a lot of hardware to cram in there. I am aware of a push towards phones that are as thin as possible and that there are thinner phones. The specs actually look worse on paper than the phone feels in my hand. Of course, to circumvent all this discovery I could have just gone to the mobile phone shop and picked one up and had a play. But that would require leaving the house for somewhere other than the gym or work. Plus the new phone was supposed to make it less likely I needed to go into shops, not more!

Other first impressions were:

• The quality of the display actually seemed fine to me, despite the warnings; perhaps again due to my ignorance and lack of experience with other devices
• Setting up was smooth enough - contacts from various locations were dragged in leaving a bit of tidying up to be done in terms of combining records. This was Ok for me with 50 odd 'friends' on facebook and the like - I'm unsure how this would scale to the inconceivably large such networks the 'youngsters' seem to have nowadays. Wireless network setup was easy enough. Google helped in the setup of Outlook though the lack of configurability of IE on the phone meant I had to email the Exchange server certificate to myself via my Gmail account and simply click on it to install it. I suppose Bing and a.n.other web email provider would have helped similarly;)
• Never having used an onscreen keyboard, this was initially a surprise in that I couldn’t type with both speed and accuracy. A surprise primarily because I hadn’t thought about it I should quickly add. I briefly considered the idea of connecting a bluetooth keyboard. Very briefly as this kind of defeats the purpose of a mobile phone! I quickly got better, particularly when I switched to landscape mode though I thought it interesting that this was not supported by all apps where data entry was an option. Here we also see an advantage for bigger phones I'm sure. One issue here as well - no left/right/up/down cursor option on the standard keyboard if you want to go back and correct a typo, for example. It is not easy to accurately select between characters using the onscreen keyboard and the select/ cut and paste functionality starts popping up and getting the way. So I googled and I was missing a trick here. This may be teaching the reader to suck eggs but if you hold anywhere in the editing region a cursor will appear which provides the visual cue to then facilitate selection of the correct location for subsequent editing. Not intuitive to me but perhaps an accepted standard of which I was unaware. Google found this here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsphone/en-gb/howto/wp7/basics/keyboard-tips.aspx. I imagine there are lots of little tricks like this I am missing and spending a few hours reviewing such basic tutorial materials might be wise!
• The need to power back up by using the main power button seems unnecessary. One would have thought a swipe of the display should be sufficient to reactivate. Perhaps there are power conservation issues behind this choice.
• The WP7 UX is pleasant and intuitive - I very quickly became accustomed to the UI.
• We went out to the local rocky beach for a few hours of early spring sun last Sunday which gave me the perfect opportunity to play with the 8MP camera, which is supposed to be fairly decent as mobile cameras go, certainly considerably better than the 710 if the reviews are accurate; and a lot better than my previous cheap phones which weren't very good at all. I managed to take several shots of the sky or ground inadvertently … I'm not entirely sure how still. Picture quality was a little variable partly perhaps due to a lack of familiarity but as I would expect on a nice sunny day most photos came out well. I also tried the post to Facebook option but, wouldn’t you have guessed it, I didn’t have the connectivity on the beach. One point of note here was that I might have expected the phone to try again in the background later though I suppose the option to retry manually would have at least been available should I have left the app option open until later
• One issue that has occurred 4 or 5 times in my 2 weeks of ownership is Outlook throwing an error 86000108 when syncing with our exchange server. Google again helped and corrupt/ inconsistent data is mentioned with the resolution being simply to remove email from the Outlook sync options and then add again via the general phone settings (as Outlook will disappear from the apps when you do this) in which case I guess Outlook does a full pull down of the allied data again. Hopefully a better, longer term fix for this will become available.
• I've generally been v.impressed with the responsiveness of UX - just one gripe so far: once or twice when playing podcasts the summary screen seems to have become non-responsive and I've needed to go back into the app proper to restart playback. As an aside I've never been a big fan of 'media management' software such as iTunes or Zune, preferring to manage the files myself and just stick what I want on the phone from where I want to keep it. But the Zune software seems a lot better than the version of iTunes I tried at least and I've even let it take over managing the 3 or 4 podcasts I follow.
• The voice recognition angle isn't very impressive. I would imagine that the IPhone/ Siri has a distinct advantage here as the scope on Win Phone 7 is more limited than I was expecting. For example, the textbox entry control doesn't support voice recognition so I can't populate data entry forms on a website via speech.

Latest news is I have made my first phone call (!) - to the gym when my Outlook reminder popped up to book a spin class. I have yet to receive a call but the call quality, even in my house with 2-3 bars of signal was good, my end at least.

I'll see if I remain motivated in a few weeks time for a follow up post in case this beginners stuff is actually use to anyone. What would perhaps be more useful might be if I manage to get my developers hat on and start writing Silverlight apps for this phone ... Talking of which let me know if you want one written.

Chris
Propona