Conversations with Nokia Lumia 800, First Take ~ SCRATCH e-PAD!

Lumia is a term coined by 20th century artist Thomas Wilfred referring to an art created from light. In the 21st century, its now being used to describe a mobilephone lineage from a company who sees it as a ray of light and hope to reclaim its lost glory.

Well, I honestly believed that Nokia moved pass the words concept in many ways by creating few works of art that shines bright like the Nokia Lumia 800. The phone has the Nokia N9's design and construction that I bewitchingly adore, the revolutionary unibody polycarbonate cover that feels very solid and sturdy to hold; the seamlessly attractive design; the curve Gorilla glass display engineered to give a pleasurable swipe and worry free impression being scratch proof; the thin and weightless construction; the curve sides among others, summing it up to become one of the most crafty and attractive mobilephone device in the market at the moment.

I got the all black variant of the phone and it looks seriously beautiful at a glance. Everything on the facade is black from the outer cover to the glass display except the Nokia logo and the 3 Windows Phone buttons at the bottom which were tainted white, but what makes it more attractive is the the deep black screen appearance as a result of the Nokia's Clear Black Display (CBD) technology.

Turning the phone on, gives me my first taste of the Windows Phone 7.5 platform, the operating system that I hesitantly accept in lieu of Symbian for being unattractive with its tile design menu system, lackluster user interface and poor customization, but as I expected less about it, my initial experience became mind blowing, since it defied most of my negative impressions on it. For instance when it comes to the overall user experienced, I was surprise to find out that Windows Phone handles this effortlessly giving first time users an easy way around. Everything seems simple yet modern and beautiful with its impressive and clean graphic transitions. I'd like to call it the most graphic-rich operating system in the mobilephone space being deeply integrated to all applications.

Sleek and smooth? 2 levels higher in sleekness and smoothness I would say compared to Android or Symbian, even if it only runs a single core 1.4Ghz CPU. The current dual cores and quad cores came out short to Windows Phone implementation of its UI, a real proof that processors can "never" offset clunky operating systems.

The tile menu system was a huge surprise as well being useful and lively. I thought it were just purely colored tiles before giving a dull impression, but they were live tiles that were flipping and changing as designed. There were even tiles that has graphic animation like the Xbox Live where a user avatar peeps out every now and then, you can never find that anywhere! Tiles are FUN...!

Customization, its probably one of Windows Phones weakest area that they must deal with accordingly. Come to think of it, the background menu color beneath the live tiles cannot be modified giving users only two colors to choose from, black and white; users cannot add and use there own message alert tone, only ringtones; it doesn't support theme system; wallpaper can only be applied to the lock and unlock screen, among others. The system is fully restricted and its annoying to people like me who were accustomed to this features.

... Well, so much were already said and discussed and this is just the first impression article. In depth discussion will be featured on the next Nokia Lumia 800 blog post as I continue to discover more about the phone and Windows Phone operating system, watch out for it. In the meantime enjoy this first few images of the flashing bright light in the Lumia stable. Enjoy!