Nokia Lumia 710 and 800

[Ben]

Yesterday Nokia unveiled its first Windows Phone 7 handsets to the world. The widely expected Lumia 800, based on the N9, is the high-end offering. What's of more interest to many is the 710, a cheaper offering that boasts similar enough specs to make it a compelling proposition.

The 800 is expected to go for around £450 SIM-Free, harking back to top-end SIM-Free prices of old and certainly nowhere near the £700 price of the top-end iPhone (though this does pack significantly more memory and other extras), which in itself may help it to sell. The 710, however, will be closer to the £250 mark, and its revival of Nokia's Express-On coloured covers (as they used to be called) may make it a favourite among younger phone buyers.

There have been a few potential blunders. "Lumia" is a new brand and only time will tell if Nokia can plant it successfully in the hearts and minds of consumers. For me, the brand needed to be stronger. The colour options on the 800, basically neon blue and neon pink, are garish, but may attract wondering eyes that end up settling on the black version. Spec-wise, the handsets don't stand up particularly well to some of their Android competitors, but then Nokia have always been a little like Apple in that regard and probably won't jump on the spec bandwagon.

I don't think this announcement alone is enough to reverse Nokia's fortunes. However, it's a start, and it'll all depend now on how quickly Nokia can follow the debut Lumia devices up with others, and an ecosystem to support them.

More info: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15459118

[Wilt]

Glad to see they've tried again with the n9 style - gorgeous phone but crippled by a dead OS - which was apparently very nice, but still dead.

I've always really like the high-end Nokia hardware but thought the software was lacking - WP should help out with this, and the nice hardware should help WP grab some market share.

Once again finding it difficult to not buy a new phone...

[Ben]

See, I haven't owned a high-end Nokia since the N95 8GB, which makes me out-of-touch I know, but every high-end Nokia I owned (mostly NSeries) were, I thought, underpowered. They typically ran slow CPUs with less than adequate amounts of RAM to keep everything happy. I think poor memory provisions amplified a lot of Symbian's shortcomings over the years.

I usually enjoyed the form-factors and the keypads, plus the call quality and general robustness of the devices. Now everything's in a touch-screen and calls slip towards irrelevance none of the things I loved about my Nokia's remain. Ho hum.

Doesn't mean I don't want to play with an 800, though. I do. I do I do!

[Wilt]

True, but I think you could have given Symbian a quad-core 2Ghz CPU with 4GB of RAM and it still would have sucked...but having said that, yeah the specs of Nokias can be a bit underwhelming...and we've seen that again here. A single core 1.4Ghz processor with half of the RAM of it's predecessor? Hmm...

We'll have to see how well it runs - in comparison with other Windows Phones it is one of the best, only the HTC Titan beats it if I'm not mistaken.

What I don't understand is the £200 difference between the 800 and the 710. Doing a side-by-side comparison (http://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=4240&idPhone2=4276) I don't see why there is such a large difference.

[Ben]

I think they're going for the desirability factor of the 800 (the premium materials). They want it to be expensive, high margin, a bit unique if you like.

They've gone the other way with the 710, deliberately going for a lower margin, mass-market appeal. Side by side with the 800 it looks like a steal, and I think Nokia intended exactly that. A teeny tiny halo effect.

[miffed]

Express on covers eh ? I used to love and hate these - I detested the bright coloured (union Jacks , football teams ) and cheap flimsy ill fitting ones .... but I did like the fact I if I had dropped my phone , I could refurbish it for very little , very easily !

[Hands0n]

Okay, Lumia, I'm having great trouble getting my head around that. It sounds so much like Consignia (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2002480.stm), that has returned to being The Post Office. It doesn't actually say anything about the new Nokia WP7 smartphone, but it does distract. All the while I'm reading about the spec and the new Mango WP7 I keep hearing in my head "Lumia .... Lumia .... Lumia", leaving me unable to focus on what I'm reading.

So what are we to make of the new Nokia then? Everyone is raving about it, everyone who was a raving Nokia Nutter back in the day when Symbian was the greatest thing since the greatest thing. Only it really wasn't. Think The Emperor's New Clothes and you'd be more than half right, Symbian sucked.

I sampled WP7 in its first outing, using a Samsung Omnia 7 loaned to me by Three. The hardware was gorgeous but I really did find too much "wrong" with the WP7 OS, there is an article elsewhere on Talk3G about that. But I have not sampled the new WP7 Mango OS, and am told by those who have that it is very good indeed. These are folk I know and trust and so their opinion is to be respected.

The new Lumia 800 has caught my attention, not least because it is something of a hardware lift of the N9 as was and now is not. That looked rather fetching. I will certainly be trying to get my mitts on one to evaluate. But would I actually buy one to use as a main or secondary smartphone? I think the answer right now is a very firm "No". There is too much going on in my smartphone life around iOS and Android. I do not need, nor want, a third (fourth actually if you count my WebOS Palm Pre Plus).

So who is the likely customer for the new Nokia WP7 devices? I think obviously it will be the Nokia die hards who have been waiting for the new generation Nokia device, no matter what it is. Then there will be those who find the new smartphone attractive and appealing, and there could be lots of those. But I do think that the success, or otherwise, will depend on how much investment Nokia, Microsoft and even the mobile networks themselves put into promoting the new Lumia range. We all saw how the public stayed away in droves from the first outing of WP7. That same public will likely do the same this time too if they cannot be persuaded that the Lumia is the basis for their future survival.

It really is interesting. Apple have literally advertised the nuts off the iPhone to get it into the world's psyche where it resides very comfortably these days. Android has had to do virtually nothing except be available at extraordinarily keen prices and be as ubiquitously accessible on all of the world's networks. But Nokia/Microsoft have amply demonstrated that simply bringing out a new OS/smartphone and poking some rather oddly constructed media advertisements is not enough to secure success.