Nokia Lumia 800 review: Contacts and Calling 0

Contacts

Initial set-up of the Nokia Lumia 800 generates a cloud based "People" (contacts) list based on Windows Live, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google and others accounts you set-up with information from the different services merged to create a single combined list.

This relies mainly on the same contact names used across the services with any remaining duplicates easily merged by opening a Person (contact) from the list and tapping on the link button and selecting another Person (contact) to merge with them.

It's all about making things more personal and we love the easy way suggestions of people to link can be added by a single tap.

In addition to this, People (contacts) can be transferred from your old Bluetooth-enabled phone in seconds via the pre-installed Contacts Transfer app to be merged with the cloud based information previously downloaded.

The only downside to this system is that we have not been able to find a way to hide some contacts and show others from the same service.You can set all contacts to display, link up all your buddies, then shut down the rest of the people from Facebook or Twitter you don't want to see, but this can lead to erratic contact info in our tests.

A nice way of achieving this would be to group/categorise contacts in the different services and display or hide contacts via the groups/categories they are in.

A frustration that can occur when merging People is that if a specific field is slightly different between services it is duplicated for each service.

Once everything is set up the People list can be swiped vertically, searched via the soft search icon (magnifying glass in a circle) or quick navigated by tapping on one of the start letter indicators which brings up a quick A-Z with any unpopulated start letters greyed out.

A left swipe transitions to the What's New screen showing recent posts from your People on the services that you have set-up (such as Twitter and Facebook) where a single tap enters a reply to post/conversation screen.

A second left swipe transitions to a tile list of your recently interacted with People records and a third and final swipe returns to the original People list.

Calling

Calling is an area where things seem a little awkward as you have to tap on the "Phone" tile which opens a phone history screen which equates to a call log. At the base of this screen, the soft bar contains, from left to right: voicemail access, dial screen access, People access and search functionality for the phone history screen.

Once in the dial screen, all is kept excessively simple as although the dial pad shows letters there is no way to make use of them in terms of smart dialling to bring up contacts. In this area we had come to like the live search/matching window above the dial pad on Symbian devices.

Call quality on the Nokia Lumia 800 is excellent, partially due to its polycarbonate chassis meaning that there are no large pieces of metal for radio signals to bounce off. This is also the reason for the high speed and accuracy of GPS fix discussed later in the Maps section.

We used an Orange SIM for the test, and found that signal was maintained well, with the 3G signal switching quickly between Orange and T-Mobile on the Nokia Lumia 800.

Nokia Lumia 800 review: Internet

When it comes to the internet, the Nokia Lumia 800 is one of the fastest mobile internet experiences we have encountered, with lightning response loading pages in less than a second and the weight of the TechRadarwebsite in less than 3 seconds when connected to a WiFi hotspot only capable of c.1.5Mbps (on its best run).

It's not faster than the Safari browser or the option on the Samsung Galaxy S2, but it's easily good enough to be a decent experience for web browsing on the go.

We tested all three devices side by side over a 3G and Wi-Fi connection, and out of three tests, only once did the Lumia 800 manage to load a site faster than both devices, which was the mobile version of the BBC site.

For heavier web browsing, we'd still recommend something from the iOS or Android stables (with a comparable processor, that is. Dual core technology seems to be a big boon here).

That problem we mentioned earlier with the touchscreen being erratic is most problematic here - you're trying to scroll through text and it will start to zoom in and out, even though no taps are registered. Nokia needs to sort this, and FAST.

Although there is an Internet Explorer icon most people start the internet session with a search which is where the bottom right search button (magnifying glass) and the Local Scout app come into their own.

One tap on the Search button and up pops the Bing search app, but when you look closer this is so much more than the standard Bing website. At the bottom of the screen in the soft bar, are three or four icons, depending on if you have permitted the search app to use your location information, which are, from left to right:

• Local Scout: Tap the buildings icon and the separate Location Scout app will start, displaying local places of interested based on food, entertainment and shops, and generally comes up with good and relevant results, even in the UK.
  
  

• Music Recognition: Tap the musical note icon and the phone listens for music in the background, identifies and provides a link to an album containing it on the Marketplace. Again, the implementation is excellent and probably will have the likes of Shazam worried.

• QR Code and Microsoft Tag scanner: Tap the eye icon and the camera turns on and if you position a QR code or Microsoft Tag in the centre reticule it reads it and responds.

• Audio Search: Tap the microphone icon and the microphone turns on and anything you say will be entered in the search field and the results of a web search will be displayed as if you had typed it in and pressed enter. It's nothing compared to Apple's Siri – but it's still OK if you want to eschew tapping words into the phone.

All this said the one big limitation is that Adobe flash player does not support the Nokia Lumia 800, providing the message "Sorry Adobe Flash Player is not available from Adobe for your device's operating system or browser."

We have been informed by Nokia that this is a result of Adobe playing catch up with the newly release Internet Explorer 9 web browser and that support is soon to be provided – although we'll wait to see if that's really the case, as we know Microsoft isn't so hot on letting Flash be used for its mobile browser.

The debate over Flash video on mobile devices is still raging, and now Adobe has announced its scrapping the system in favour for HTML 5, we're excited at the prospect of it being over. However, the fact remains that the Lumia 800 still can't render internet content properly - we've marked down the iPhone for this consistently, as the Galaxy S2 shows mobile Flash video can look fantastic without impacting system resources.