Nokia Lumia 800 review | Interface 0

The major difference between Nokia Lumia series and other Nokia phones is the fact that it uses the Microsoft Windows Phone operating system. The system itself is nothing new, of course, releasing its latest incarnation (WP 7.5) on the HTC Titan and HTC Radar earlier this year.

A major point for and against WP7 for some is that it looks completely different to iPhone, Android, Symbian and Meego as the concept of application grids is nowhere to be seen.

Instead of the more standard homescreen, or "Start Screen" in the case of Windows phone 7.5, the Nokia Lumia 800 uses "Live Tiles", fitting a 2x4 grid (although Calendar and Pictures tiles are full screen width) of tiles on the screen, vertically scrolling to display as many tiles as you wish to add.

Adding tiles to the Start screen is as easy as left swiping to the apps list, long pressing an app and selecting "pin to start", with removing a tile requiring a long press on the tile on the Start page and then tapping the drawing pin with a line through it.

Moving tiles around is just as easy, requiring a long press and then dragging them to the desired location.

At first we were unsure about the large tile based layout, finding it a little cumbersome and poor screen real estate usage, but within a couple of days our opinion changed. The major advantage is speed of use. You don't need to be looking as closely at your phone to use it as the chances of miss pressing are greatly reduced.

Going forward, there will also be more advantages to the system as the Live Tiles as applications are able to show dedicated information instead of an icon - for instance, the BA app will turn into a QR code when you're about to board a flight which can be used in place of a boarding pass.

The other section of the home screen is the apps list, which is quite standard, and somewhat antiquated in some ways as it is just an alphabetical list of your apps, or app groups in the case of Office and Games.

In its defence this form of app list layout is, again, easy to navigate, knowing exactly where an app will sit in the list as done in the Windows PC start menu. This is further aided by the soft search button on the left hand side of the list providing a live filter of the list based on text entry.

This all means that folders are long gone, but after a while you realise that in this format, you don't need them – although as you fill the phone with apps, we would like the ability to sort them into little groups. Being able to search by letter isn't enough - we want customisation in the same way users are able to group together contacts and pin them to the start menu.

A backward step in WP7 is that the top status bar is not interactive like we have become accustomed to with other operating systems.

To toggle Bluetooth, WiFi and Flight Mode on/off you have to go through Settings, which was a major frustration until we found an app on the Marketplace called Connectivity Shortcuts which brought this functionality to the Start screen as Tiles.

Another frustration is that the status bar often only displays the time meaning you have no knowledge of connectivity or remaining power until you swipe down from the top of the screen to see these elements.

Microsoft thinks this cleans the screen up, but given knowing your signal is a pre-requisite for a lot of applications, we'd at least like the option to keep it there constantly - plus too many applications don't support the swipe-down method.

On a more positive slant, the repeated use of familiar icons throughout the user interface for specific functions, means that you know what a button does at a glance without having to read it. In this way the GUI feels intuitive rather than learnt.

Another feature Symbian users have become accustomed to over the years is the use of profiles to quickly switch between different scenarios in their daily life like, General, Silent, Meeting, Outdoor, Pager and Offline. Sadly, these are all gone except for Offline, which is now Flight Mode, and the ability to put the phone into vibrate only mode.

Although profiles have been around for many years their usefulness has increased more recently with the invention of location and time based auto profile switching apps and this is what will be really missed.

Another thing we became accustomed to was repeatedly hitting the back button to be able to close Internet Explorer and other apps as there is no Close/Exit button. The current WP7 coding means that apps close via the back button, but only from a specific screen which has to be navigated back to before the app can be closed/exited.

Even long pressing the back button to open the task manager does not provide an option to close open apps, but only permits switching between apps. This said, however we did not note any speed reduction with six apps showing in the Task Manager.

This is assisted by the fact that only a very select set of the apps on WP7 devices can run in the background and the rest are suspended (disabled) when not on top – we were very impressed with the speed of the Lumia 800 throughout testing.

One major problem we did note: sliding your finger across the touchscreen would sometimes be inexplicably registered as a tap, opening an app or zooming into the text. We thought this would be fixed with the software update, but to no avail.

If you want to learn more about the new Microsoft mobile operating system, FF

Nokia Lumia 800 review: Messaging

The Nokia Lumia supports the standard SMS, MMS and e-mail with a few differences.

During initial phone set-up you are asked to set up e-mail + accounts settings which enables the user to add Windows Live (Hotmail, Xbox LIVE, Messenger, Calendar and others), Outlook (Exchange and Office 360), Nokia Mail (provided by Yahoo!), Yahoo! Mail, Google (Mail and Calendar), Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other email accounts (POP and IMAP) as well as providing advanced setup to manually use your accounts.

One interesting thing we found was your LinkedIn account is added automatically if it is linked to your Windows Live account. Another thing to note is that during initial phone setup you are asked for a Windows Live and Nokia account. The Windows Live account you use at this point cannot be removed from the phone.

Once all of your accounts are set-up there are a number of ways to get social. The first is the Messaging app which merges SMS, MMS, Windows Messenger and Facebook chat although they are not grouped so you have to laterally swipe to switch between SMS/MMS and Facebook.

We were also surprised that Nokia Chat contacts are not imported alongside Facebook contacts as they could be associated with the Windows Live and Nokia accounts already added.

Text entry is clean and easy with its keys large enough for the average fingers to work around without many incorrect presses and an auto complete suggestions bar between the keyboard and the entry field.

Words are automatically selected depending on which information you're adding, which is a nice touch, and you can tap on a word to be given the option to add it to the dictionary or long press to bring up a cursor to select elements of text.

However, this long press takes ages when you're trying to just tap an element of the text to interact with – it's miles slower than the competition.

The keyboard is excellent on the Nokia Lumia 800 though, with speedy typing speeds easy to attain – although it's not as intuitive as the Apple or Android options out there, where we noted around two or three more mistakes per message and less accurate guessing of what our fudge-fingered keyboard mashings were trying to convey.

Finally, we were surprised to see that although Microsoft Communicator has been rolled out to all Nokia Symbian Anna devices it doesn't appear in the new Nokia Lumia 800.