Nokia Finally Release Their First “Windows Phone” Phone

The tech world has been waiting for the first Nokia Windows Phone phone since Nokia announced late last year that they were going to abandon their Symbian mobile phone operating system, were going into a partnership with Microsoft, and would be adopting Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system.

Well today it arrived. As many tech writers predicted Nokia have put the Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) operating system on their N9 phone and renamed it the Lumia 800.

The Lumia 800 has been upgraded with an f2.2 Carl Ziess lens 8 megapixel camera. If this is a ‘real’ f2.2 then this lens is even brighter than the lens in the new Apple 4S.

It also comes with a 3.7 AMOLED “ClearBlack” hi-resolution curved Gorilla Glass (scratch resistant) screen.

In this day where dual-core CPUs are becoming common in phones (well the iPhone 4S has one and so does the Samsung Galaxy II S and the Google Nexus) the Lumia 800 still has a single CPU—although it is a 1.4 Ghz CPU. Early reports (well, one report that I could find) indicates that the phone is quick and smooth and does not show any lag due to the single CPU processor. This could be due to the Windows Phone 7.5 operating system which is known to be lighter on CPU requirements than either Apple’s iOS 5 or Google’s Andriod 3 (I don’t know about v4 ICS of Android).

What we don’t know anything about yet are battery life and how good is the antenna. For me these are two big points that many people overlook. Just how useful is a mobile phone if the antenna is rubbish? And having to charge a mobile every day would drive me nuts. My Motorola Defy generally gets into the 5th day before it is down to 15 percent and starts to bully me into putting it on the charger.

I suspect we are going to see a lot of advertising for the Lunia 800 from both Microsoft and Nokia in the lead up to Christmas—assuming it is going to be released in Australia (but maybe it isn’t).

There was also a lower-end Lumia 710 released at the same time which is also a Windows Phone phone.

To see more at TechCrunch go here. To see more at Engadget go here or click on the picture.

The TWiT team (This Week in Tech) are bound to talk about this phone. If they discover or bring up anything really interesting I will either add a note to this post or do a separate post about it.