9 ms·
Nokia announces the Lumia 800, the 'first real Windows Phone'
- nextparadigms 15y agoOuch. Are they implying the other WP7 phones are just cheap fakes? The other OEM's must not be too happy about this today. Why do I get the feeling the other OEM's were just "used" to help WP7 survive for another year until the "real" WP7 manufacturer arrives?
- potatolicious 15y agoI suspect it's the other way around. MSFT bet the company on WP7, clearly has spent oodles of time and effort on it, but all of the launch devices were snoozefests - some were outright, lazy ripoffs of the OEMs' existing Android phones. There was nothing unique, compelling, or, well, anything about these phones. Most were even exceptionally crappy with the exception of the Samsung. It's clear that none of the OEMs were willing to invest the resources to design and build a piece of hardware that was compelling. I don't blame Microsoft for shopping around for an "official" manufacturer after that little debacle. And I say: Finally! One of the weaknesses of Android has always been this clearly demarcated line between hardware and software, as necessitated by its licensing terms and mission statement. iPhones don't suffer from the effects of this - the software plays closely with the hardware, and it shows. With beautiful industrial design (honestly, I'm a fan of this new phone) and tight hardware-software integration, Microsoft can stand a real chance. I say, about time.
- guruz 15y agoI might get downvoted for this sarcasm, but: That thing looks like a lazy ripoff of the Nokia N9. But oh well. They're both beautiful :-) Disclaimer: I used to work for Nokia.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- TallTalesOrTrue 15y agoProbably was necessary to keep the beautiful hardware intact to change the guts completely in less than a year. Look at iPhone 4S. Almost no visual changes in exterior in a year and a half and the OS didn't change that much either... why change the looks of something that is already so beautiful.
- rkwz 15y ago>That thing looks like a lazy ripoff of the Nokia N9. Doesn't that apply to iPhone4S as well?
- recoiledsnake 15y agoIt takes 18 months to design a phone and get it to market(along with the carrier approval and changes and all that nonsense). The MS deal was announced in Feb of this year. What did you expect?
- jinushaun 15y agoNokia is correct. The first wave of WP7 phones were awful, boring, cheap looking, giant bricks, etc. No standout desirable devices, which hurt the platform. That is the risk of the MS model: your partners will take your OS and put it on cheap crappy hardware and lose to Apple. The Lumia 800 is the first desirable WP7 device.
- recoiledsnake 15y agoIt's a sign that an OEM needs to up their game. Do we care about Dell whining that Sony makes better looking laptops? Get with the program, this is how MS took over the PC market, by making the OEMs compete on all things thus benefiting the consumer immensely.
- contextfree 15y ago"they" = Nokia, not Microsoft
- potch 15y ago"No seriously this time you guys!"
- rdl 15y agoWow. Part of me wants this to suck, just so there are only iPhone and Android to worry about ever developing for, but this actually looks good enough to consider. I looked at WP through BizSpark a little, and it looks easier to develop for than iOS or Android, at least for corporate apps. It's possible RIM will lose out in the "corporate owned/managed" market to WP, especially if they can build in equivalent or better security and management tools. If I were MS/Nokia, I'd heavily subsidize this in ways other than just reducing the retail price; maybe even go for a $799 retail MSRP but heavily discount through the carriers or through channels to $0-400. You want the price to make it seem premium (or at least as good as a high-end Android or iPhone 4S), but they're the new entrant, so using price to promote the product might be a win. Maybe something like "$400 credit for any smartphone trade-in" at retail. Or, bundle "we pay your phone bill for 3 months" or something.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- iamichi 15y agoI just finished my first Mango app and it was a overall nicer experience than Android. Overall on par with iOS for me, if a bit easier.
- brudgers 15y agoBalmer: Developers, Developers, Developers It's what you can focus on for the long term when founders and early employees control enough of the company to ignore Wall Street's quarterly timeline. Bootstrapping has long term payoffs.
- dave1010uk 15y agoIn the UK (and I believe much of the rest of Europe), the monthly line rental is basically paying off a loan for the phone. You can get (just about) any phone for £0 up front if you're willing to pay enough every month. E.g. if the phone costs £500 out of contract ("pay as you go"), it will probably be free on a 18-month contract that costs £40/month. If you chose a £20/month contract then you'd have to pay about £200 up front.
- bhoflack 15y agoThis phone looks ugly compared to their leaked prototypes.
- TallTalesOrTrue 15y agoHere: see for yourself. http://www.nokia.co.uk/gb-en/products/phone/lumia800/ http://www.nokia.co.uk/gb-en/products/phone/lumia800/ The 710 looks ok but the 800 is pretty nice imo.
- jsnell 15y agoIn nature the N9 is easily the best looking and feeling phone I've seen, including all iPhone models. It's not obvious from the pictures whether the case changed in any way from the N9 to the 800, but at least it doesn't look like anything major.
- TallTalesOrTrue 15y agoThe 800 basically looks like N9 with Windows Phone OS on it. Hope the OS has met its match in this hardware. The pictures sure look stunning.
- fungi 15y agohttp://europe.nokia.com/find-products/devices/nokia-n9/specifications http://europe.nokia.com/find-products/devices/nokia-n9/speci... http://www.nokia.co.uk/gb-en/products/phone/lumia800/specifications/ http://www.nokia.co.uk/gb-en/products/phone/lumia800/specifi... aside from the n9 case design its pretty boring spec and feature wise... but hey its got windows and kids around here are in to that.
- yread 15y agoWow there's gonna be Nokia Windows Phones for 60 euros
- timthorn 15y agoNo, I don't think so - that's for a phone in the Asha (non-WP7) range. Cheapest WP is the Lumia 710 at 270 Euros.
- yread 15y agouh ok. I got confused as he mentioned the retail price between talking about marketing of WP7...
- iaskwhy 15y agoThe Windows Phones start at 270 euros.
- cavalcade 15y agothats the Symbian ones
- juhanaj 15y agoS40 not Symbian
- nextparadigms 15y agoThey are developing Meltemi for low-end range. They won't use WP7 for that.
- Jabbles 15y agoI hope this does well. As a customer in this market I think increased competition can only be a good thing. I'll need a new phone in a few weeks, and I'm now looking forward to comparing the 4S, Nexus and this.
- navs 15y agoI love the look of WP7 and this phone looks decent! I don't generally use apps, preferring webapps on the mobile browser. How does WP7's browser compare to Android or iOS? I've heard some say its good, others saying its terrible. Its hard to get an unbiased answer after years of thrashing desktop IE.
- JBiserkov 15y agoAs far as I know pre-Mango IE was ~ 7, while the Mango one is branded as 9, so a huge leap, which might account for some of the difference in opinions.
- thomasz 15y agoAlthough IE has been updated to 9 with Mangoo which is a decent browser, i would expect the same problems Opara gets with cutting edge stuff: You are very lucky if the app got tested for IE. I never encountered serious problems though, even with IE7.
- macavity23 15y agoIE getting punished by the marketplace for not adhering to standards?! The prayers of a hundred thousand angry webdevs have surely been answered :-)
- thomasz 15y agoyou assume that most websites care about standards. They don't.[1] Writing truly standards compliant html is too much hassle for most people out there, and brings next to nothing in value. What they do is test it against the important implementations: On the desktop IE 7+, Firefox 3+, Chrome. For mobile sites they test for both webkit flavors, and that's it. Again, IE mobile is facing the same problems as Opara: Both are very decent browsers, but they have different ways of handling the strange corner cases in the tag soup out there than the market leaders. errata: The web has become a lot better w/r to standards in the last couple of years. Like I said before, I've encountered very few glitches with IE7, and none so far with IE9. [1]http://html5.validator.nu/?doc=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com http://html5.validator.nu/?doc=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator...
- vegai 15y agoIs anyone doing high quality non-smart phones anymore? I'm looking for something that's small, sturdy with long battery life. Preferably with good music playing. I suppose Sony Ericssons's non-android phones are pretty good in that space, are there any others?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- obeattie 15y agoWell… Nokia kinda is. Check out the S40 Asha phones Nokia released today. (Though maybe they class as smartphones too?)
- vegai 15y agoYeah, I guess... I really don't regard Symbian as a viable platform, though
- juhanaj 15y agoNokia's non-smartphones don't have Symbian. They have S40.
- codedivine 15y agoFirst off, S40 isn't Symbian. Secondly, didn't you just ask for a featurephone then why do you care about the platform?
- vegai 15y agoOh right. Good point. Let me rephrase what I really feel: After my three previous Nokia phones, I don't feel Nokia is a viable producer of high quality phones. In fact, part of me wants to punish them for selling me such junk and enveloping me in some sort of cognitive dissonance field that made me think they were doing good work. Then again, Elop got there to change exactly that, so perhaps I should give them a benefit of doubt now.
- cavalcade 15y agojust spent 2 weeks developing an MVP app for a photo sharing startup. passed to the store last night. :) Dev tools are smooth but the biggest issue is the lack of mature open source libraries (Oauth was buggy and i cant find a Tumblr, Blogger cross posting lib)
- regularfry 15y agoThen there's that little voice in the back of my head saying "Cyanogenmod?"
- seltzered_ 15y agoFor t-mobile america users/cheapskates: it's quad-band 3G unlike the N9's penta-band 3G, so I don't see this phone selling on t-mobile at all. Too bad though, I've been wanting to replace my nexus one with a well-designed easily jailbreakable/sim-unlockable os.
- untog 15y agoLooking at the specs: http://www.nokia.co.uk/gb-en/products/phone/lumia800/specifications/ http://www.nokia.co.uk/gb-en/products/phone/lumia800/specifi... It says it does 850 and 1900, which are T-Mobile bands, no?
- seltzered_ 15y agot-mobile us 3G band needs 1700 mhz (I believe that's the receiving frequency). example: even an unlocked iphone supports 850 / 1900 / 2100 hsdpa/3G, but won't get more than "edge" speed due to the non-support of 1700 mhz
- untog 15y agoAh, you're right. How confusing/annoying.
- cooldeal 15y agoWill it run on AT&T? A couple of my friends want that phone NOW.
- seltzered_ 15y agoyeah, should work fine on att 3g
- aninteger 15y agoHaving owned S40 and S60 I doubt that any Nokia phone would be easily jailbreakable.
- drodil 15y agohttp://twitpic.com/5siddh/full http://twitpic.com/5siddh/full
- recoiledsnake 15y agoIt's funny how people now call Meego a great OS, but if Nokia had gone with Meego, everyone would be saying "where are the apps?" "This would be better with Android on it". "The same icon based UI sucks". And it probably wouldn't sell well.
- parasitius 15y ago"These are the imminent signs of a fake" <--- What...exactly... does that mean? Definition of imminent: "About to happen"
- eis 15y agoI hope they rename it for the spanish market: http://www.wordmagicsoft.com/dictionary/es-en/lumia.php http://www.wordmagicsoft.com/dictionary/es-en/lumia.php
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- omaranto 15y agoI don't think that's a very common word in Spanish. Both my wife and I are fairly well-read Mexicans and neither of us had ever heard or seen the word. The Royal Spanish Academy's dictionary does include it, but they add the annotation "p. us.", which means "little used". So I don't think many people in either Mexico or, judging by the dictionary, Spain will know the word, but Spanish does vary quite a bit from country to country, so it might be more or less common somewhere else.
- jcpmmx 15y agojajaja i didnt know that!
- adolfojp 15y agoThat word has no meaning in Puerto Rican Spanish.
- achompas 15y ago+1 to everyone else saying it's not a common word. My Cuban family and I certainly have never used it, and I don't know any other Hispanics/Latinos who have used it before.
- barista 15y agoIt may not be a common word but the fact that it has such a negavtive meaning is not good for the brand particularly if its a name for the whole lineup and not just one device.
- juliano_q 15y agoI really like this device, but the prospect of using Internet Explorer again really turns me off. The black Lumia 800 with Android 4.0 would be perfect for me.
- recoiledsnake 15y agoNokia reportedly was in talks with Google, but Google wasn't willing to make enough concessions to Nokia, so they went with MS.
- barista 15y agoIE 9 is actually a great little browser on the Mnago version of the OS. What doesn't work on IE9 for you? Which website that you regularly visit on your mobile?
- juliano_q 15y agoI am probably being biased here. But even nowadays I have very bad experiences with IE on desktop. The simple perspective to use IE again, even on mobile, feels wrong to me.
- barista 15y agoUnless you can be more specific about what you think is broken for you as a user, I do think you are being unreasonably biased here.
- plq 15y agoHere's my dream scenario: Nokia offers the same hardware with two different OS selections and also has Qt working on both Meego and WP platforms. This would obviously be a win-win situation for both the developer and the user. But this would be beneficial for Nokia as well, because: 1) It'd provide Nokia with hard data based on sales and user feedback on which platform performs better in real-world scenarios. Currently, the decision to drop Meego for WP platform is mostly based on "hopes and promises". 2) Having both platforms compete on even terms would also improve the overall Nokia experience on both platforms as this open and fair competition would motivate both the Microsoft and the Meego teams to do better. So, why this wouldn't happen?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- MatthewPhillips 15y agoI'd be very surprised if they weren't already working on a Qt to CIL compiler.
- aninteger 15y agoDon't you mean a C++ to CIL compiler?
- sethg 15y ago(disclaimer: Nokia employee) On the one hand, maintaining two OS teams for the same hardware would be a waste of resources. On the other hand, I have heard stories of how Microsoft would often commit several teams to build a product to the same spec: the team that got something market-ready first was handsomely rewarded, and the teams that didn’t got reassigned to wash Bill Gates’s car. On the other other hand, Microsoft (alas) has more cash to burn on this kind of adventure than Nokia does. Nokia’s pre-Elop strategy was to encourage app developers to use Qt, which could be compiled to run on either Symbian or Meego, and then the company could gracefully phase out Symbian in favor of Meego. I work on back-end stuff rather than on apps, so I don’t know how well this could have worked in practice, but I did observe that when my company phone was a (Maemo) N900, the Ovi Maps client for Maemo was several revisions behind the client for Symbian.
- Shenglong 15y agoI'm so disappointed by the color choices, and the bevel on the screen (or what looks like a bevel). Don't people ever wonder why some of the most popular phones in history have been white/black/silver only? I feel like consumer demand for mobile devices isn't driven by aesthetic choice, more so than apparent popularity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_phones http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_pho... The numerous amount of buttons on the side also makes me angry. Honestly, I have two buttons on the side of my iPhone, and a flip switch which makes perfect sense. Is it really necessary to have four different -unmarked- buttons? </end_of_complaints>
- recoiledsnake 15y agoHuh, the buttons are vol. up, vol down, power and camera(works even when in sleep/locked so that you can quickly take a picture unlike fiddling with the power and touchscreen on the iPhone). I don't see how that's numerous when they are all pretty useful.
- adolph 15y agoHow does it avoid lots of pocket/purse pictures?
- recoiledsnake 15y agoNo idea but I haven't seen one in six months of use.
- shrikant 15y agoI could be wrong, but I think that would be the proximity sensor at work.
- saturdaysaint 15y agoThe term "killer app" seems kind of outmoded, but I'm still waiting for WP7 to show me some really new functionality. I don't think we need something that can do the same stuff we've been doing for years on mobile phones, even if they've streamlined things here and there and have a pretty piece of hardware. Also, I honestly wonder if the dashboard-oriented UI makes it weak as an app platform. I have two friends who switched from iPhone to WP7 and they've both remarked how few apps they use/buy outside of the included ones. The big tiles are nice, but they also mean one's homescreen is likely to be completely dominated by basic functionality apps (e-mail, contacts, pictures, etc). I'm sure that this enhances those select home screen apps, but I think it discourages adding much. Knock the iPhone interface, but the screens pages of tiny colorful icons do seem to encourage people to collect apps like badges and actually use them more.
- untog 15y ago"Knock the iPhone interface, but the screens pages of tiny colorful icons do seem to encourage people to collect apps like badges and actually use them more." Is that a good thing? Because I'm really not sure that it is. I used a W7 phone for a few weeks and I actually loved not having to launch half a dozen different apps- I view a person, I see their Facebook updates, their tweets, photos, etc. all in one place. It's awesome.
- recoiledsnake 15y agoThird parties can add similar functionality to their live tiles too, and a lot of apps do that. For example, the package tracker app can update the live tile with the latest location of the package, the twitter app can update with the latest tweets or tweet count etc. That is the whole point of the 'glance and go' mantra. When you're busy doing other stuff, you can just glance at the homescreen to see if there's something important or not. A bunch of icons like every other phone UI designed by Xerox PARC in the early 1980s doesn't do that.
- saturdaysaint 15y agoI "get" live tiles and I kind of like the concept. I'm saying that their size has disadvantages, though. Three "pages" of apps on an iPhone (which is pretty average) hold 52 apps (16 x 3, plus the 4 in the "dock") that you can quickly navigate between. From what I've seen, anything more than 20 apps on WP7 seems to be more trouble than it's worth. At that point, you're exhausting the limit of "glance and go". Anything beyond that you relegate to the drawer of apps that few people actively use.
- misterbwong 15y agoLooks like a solid product. Not quite the halo product I was looking for from Nokia but the challenge now with WP7 is getting users and apps for their ecosystem. Users won't come over until WP7 gets a feature that users can love and show off. Apple builds up a wow feature for pretty much every single iPhone launch: 2g: (revolutionary, at the time) iPhone OS, 3g/s: Apps, 4: Facetime, 4S: Siri. A fast and dedicated camera button (one of WP7's main selling points) doesn't cut it.
- aurynn 15y agoAs an owner of an N9, this makes me kind of sad. I wrote a longer comment on another thread, but what this really makes me feel is that, instead of utilising a great design paired with WP7, there's just another indistinct me-too device to be drowned out by the iPhone. It's sad, because the people who were behind the N9 really seemed like they understood what Apple was on about, how and why the iPhone was like it was. Nokia may not have gotten all of it, but they were catching on, and with this release, I fear that spirit may have been lost.