Nokia Debuts Their First Windows Phones

It’s nice and early in London, and Nokia CEO Stephen Elop has finally put to rest months of speculation by unveiling Nokia’s first batch of Windows Phones at the Nokia World conference. It’s been a long time coming — news of a Nokia/Microsoft partnership first broke back in February — but Nokia has at long last debuted the Lumia 800 and the Lumia 710.
Lumia 800
It’s been hinted at for months now, but the handset formerly known as the Searay has finally been revealed as the Lumia 800. Stephen Elop has called it the “first real Windows Phone” — quite a lofty claim, but does the hardware live up to it?

The 800 sports a curved 3.7-inch WVGA ClearBlack AMOLED display, a single-core 1.4GHz processor, and 512MB of RAM. Mobile photographers will find much to like about the 8-megapixel camera with a f/2.2 Carl Zeiss lens, and the 16GB of onboard storage should hold quite a few cat pictures. The specs won’t exactly set anyone’s world on fire, but the design might: like the N9 before it, the Lumia 800 features a stunning unibody design that’s shaped out of a slab of durable polycarbonate material.

The style-conscious among you will also be glad to know that the Lumia 800 comes in three colors: black, cyan, and magenta. Surprisingly, the Lumia 800 is already on its way to France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK in time for a November launch. Customers in Hong Kong, India, Russia, Singapore and Taiwan will be able to nab one by the end of the year, but domestic Windows Phones fans will have to wait until early 2012.
Lumia 710
The 710 (formerly known as the Sabre) is the chunkier of the two, but that doesn’t mean it’s a slouch when it comes to hardware. It repackages the same 1.4GHz processor as seen in the Lumia 800, and pairs it with a 3.7-inch WVGA screen, and a 5-megapixel rear camera. It’s meant to be Nokia and Microsoft’s effort to capture a more budget-conscious audience, and it’s heartening to see Nokia give it the same performance potential as their more premium offering.

Though the 710 only sports 8GB of internal storage, it beats out its brother by including a microSD card slot that can accept up to 16GB of additional flash storage. It also bears the distinction of being one of the few Windows Phone with physical navigation keys, which is sure to please fans of tactile feedback.

Expect to see it hit shelves in both stealth black and crisp white, with multiple colored backplates to please the chromatically indecisive. It looks like the Lumia 710 will be headed first to Hong Kong, India, Russia, Singapore and Taiwan, alongside its more expensive brother.

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HTC HD2/Review

Official Site: www.HTC.com Company: HTC Corporation
Specs: 4.3” capacitive WVGA (800x480) touchscreen; 1GHZ Snapdragon CPU; 512 ROM; 448 RAM; 5MP camera; Wi-Fi; Bluetooh 2.1; Windows Mobile 6.5

Touted as the best phone on the market currently running Windows Mobile 6.5, the HTC HD2 is a surprisingly attractive handset thanks largely to its unique blend of cutting-edge mobile hardware and customized software. In particular, HTC’s newly created Sense UI, which operates on top of Windows Mobile, should attract men looking for a more individualistic and straightforward approach to phone navigation. All bells and whistles aside, it’s still hard to recommend this device over competing smartphones from heavy hitters such as Apple, Motorola, RIM, and Nokia, or even non-Windows Mobile HTC handsets for that matter.
This is because even with the valiant effort on the part of HTC to push limits with the HD2, no amount of face paint or engine work can fully mask the inherent usability frustrations Microsoft has still yet to address in its Windows mobile platform. However, if you are dead-set on standing out from the pack of BlackBerry, iPhone and DROID owners out there, this may be your best bet.

In terms of specs, it’s hard not to be impressed with what the HTC HD2 packs under the hood. Powered by a lightning-quick 1GHZ Snapdragon CPU and 448MB of RAM, it has more than enough processing power to make HTC’s flowing Sense UI work in buttery smooth fashion. Other additional niceties thrown in the mix include: an auto-focusing 5-megapixel video/still camera with dual LED flash, GPS, accelerometer, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1, and a variety of sensors to detect everything from the ambient light around the phone to its proximity to your head.
Despite these conveniences, the HTC HD2’s biggest attraction by far on the hardware side is its beautiful 4.3-inch, 800 x 480, capacitive WVGA touchscreen display. Thanks to its high resolution and deep color contrast, small text and images are clearly visible, making it very easy on the eyes even in relatively bright sunlight.
That’s good news considering HD2’s new Sense UI is quite a visually appealing take on Windows Mobile 6.5. In fact it’s such an overall aesthetic improvement on the operating system that many casually picking up the phone may not realize it is indeed still a Windows Mobile-powered device. Sense is far beyond just an attractive reskinning though. On the contrary, a significant amount of work was put in by the HTC team to integrate, revamp and even rip out applications or functionality deemed unnecessary. For instance, the home screen view has ingeniously been combined to not only feature the normal combination of a clock, calendar and application launcher, but also show off the local weather in a unique animated fashion that provides serious wow factor.

Looking at the device on paper from a pure specs point of view, it’s no question that the HTC HD2 is indeed a significant upgrade from previous Windows Mobile powered phones. Combined with the hard usability work conducted by HTC in its Sense UI, light hands-on use of the phone might even convince casual shoppers that it deserves similar accolades to those given to handsets like the DROID and G2. The reality is, however, that Windows Mobile does not have access to the plethora of unique apps being churned out for other mobile operating systems like Android or the iPhone OS. Nor does it exhibit the same crash reliability. In that light, it’s difficult to give the HTC HD2 the nod over other handsets in the next generation of high-performance smartphones. However, considering pricing and carriers have yet to be officially announced or its arrival in the U.S., there is a chance that competitive pricing could enhance its standing in our eyes.

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