The Nokia Lumia 800 has the awkward distinction of being the first ever Nokia phone that I've looked forward to reviewing (over exposure to the trademark diddle-ee-dee ringtone put me off, for life, back in the 90s). My greatest hope is that it finally launches the very-good Windows Phone 7 (WP7) platform into a space where it's genuinely competing with Apple and Android for market share. But will it?

For the past several weeks I've been living with Windows Phone 7 (after months of iPhone and Android competitors). First I returned to using the HTC HD7 but the past fortnight has been spent with the new Nokia Lumia 800.

Windows Phone 7

The thing with WP7 phones is that they're all practically identical in operation - they just look a bit different and have the odd special app installed. As such the Lumia 800 is hardly revolutionary - it operates almost identically to the Samsung Omnia 7 and HTC HD7 which are both a year-and-a-half old. What's different is that this is the titanic Nokia brand's flagship phone and thus could change the shape of the whole mobile phone market... in theory.

Nokia's awkward predicament

However, this isn't the Nokia of a decade ago. A long line of smartphone failures (especially those using Symbian) has resulted in the company planting its foundations upon a platform that it doesn't actually own - that's got to grate. It could have sided with Android and joined a flooded market but instead it's gone for WP7 - an environment which is more in line with Nokia's sophisticated professional roots as opposed to the Wild West Android space.

There is potential, though. Because other manufacturers only pay lip service to WP7, this is still a market segment that Nokia could practically own. But with WP7 phones being so similar, any success Nokia has in gaining WP7 some reasonable market share, will mean opening the door for competitors to flood the WP7 market like they do with Android. It's easy to imagine HTC and Samsung sitting back watching Nokia do all the work only to then bring out a bunch of near-identical handsets and happily feed off lower margins.

The holy grail of Nokia owning its own app store and locking customers into it's brand is over: Nokia's Ovi market pales into insignificance compared with Apple's, Android's and even Windows' equivalents. Nokia will have to innovate hard to get people buying dedicated Nokia apps in competition with Windows Marketplace. It has its Music service, but that immediately competes with Microsoft's Zune. The same goes for its maps. But what other choice does Nokia have? Nokia's Symbian platform and its Ovi app store have been terrible for years. So what does Nokia bring to the table with WP7?

Handling and specs

I've never really got on with how Nokia phones worked but have always appreciated the technology and build quality. The 800's special polycarbonate chassis is dense and, combined with the infinity-pool-like screen, oozes sophistication. The 3.7-inch AMOLED screen is bright, sharp (480 x 800 pixels) and has very good colour reproduction. In the right lighting, the icons simply float on the surface of the phone - the screen is invisible.

Only the flimsy USB socket flap lets the side down. Also, despite the impenetrable-looking monolithic finish, it had a couple of big scratches after a week despite being well looked after. They were only noticeable up close and under bright light, though.

The keyboard is impressively accurate despite the relatively-small screen and the spelling suggestions (and autocorrect) are very useful. The single-core 1.4GHz processor keeps things ticking along lag free. There's 16GB of built-in storage (no expansion) plus [corrected] 25GB of SkyDrive cloud storage.

The Lumia 800's eight-megapixel camera was a mixed bag. Outdoors, pictures were impressively sharp and had great colour reproduction. However, despite the powerful dual LED flash, indoor and low-light shots were too-often blurred and focussing could take a while.

The Nokia Drive application is a decent SatNav app though you'll need a separate car-mounting kit to make use of it. Nokia Maps are near identical to Microsoft's built in maps but, in my testing the search function could be hopeless: searching for the nearby Park Royal hotel in Sydney, for instance, returned one result - the Royal Park hotel in Johannesburg, South Africa. WP7's Bing Maps fared generally much better but still regularly confused shop names with small villages in Idaho.

Nokia Music did get used: Mix Radio provides genre-specific music for free. The local Gig Guide, which displays nearby concerts also worked very well. Songs are typically $1.49 each. However, it does face stiff competition from WP7's Zune Music. While songs tend to be slightly more expensive, Zune's excellent Music Pass which allows you to listen to what you want, across phone, PC and Xbox, and even download it for $12 a month, is very tempting. Nonetheless, Nokia's app is a quick-and-easy way of listening to internet radio for free. Is it a killer feature though?

Windows Phone 7

WP7 tiles are large and intuitive. Their size and ability to show live updates (number of new emails, missed calls etc) makes them more useful than iPhone icons but they're still not as customisable as Android widgets. The menus are easy to navigate but it would be nice to have Android-like button/widgets to adjust brightness and turn WiFi on and off without trawling through sub menus.

It's generally very easy to use but some features are a bit too well hidden. If you didn't know to swipe down at the top of the screen, you wouldn't know how to view battery and network icons. Also, long pressing on some icons and titles produces sub menus but not all the time. You can often find yourself looking for hidden settings or pressing the screen waiting for something to happen but to no avail. It's a minor annoyance though. Ultimately, WP7 is not quite as idiot-proof and intuitive as an iPhone, but it's not very far off.

The main navigation buttons are hit and miss. As with Android, the back button is incredibly useful and, like the iPhone button, the Windows button always gets you home. However, the search button is something else. Rather than searching contacts, addresses or whatever else you happen to be looking at, it simply takes you to a Bing search page. Much as Microsoft wants to push Bing, it's second rate in comparison to Google. It must grate with Microsoft to hear this, but allowing the option to use Google Search (and Maps) instead of Bing will only help and not hinder the adoption of WP7.

On top of this, Internet Explorer 9 is not the best mobile web browser. It's functional, but slower than others and doesn't remember passwords. It would be good to see Opera and some other decent browsers available - choice makes for a healthy platform.

Multitasking is hit and miss. Some games and apps simply freeze when you move away from them. Some, like Facebook, restart every time you switch back to them which is annoying if you then have to repeat a lot of scrolling.

I'm nitpicking quite a bit - all of the above were relatively minor failings in day-to-day usage. The issues that did weigh me down involved 'Select All' and 'Cut and Paste'. These are essential in the smartphone, share-everything era but in some applications the options simply didn't appear or work very well. Select All is useful/essential when you have to delete huge amounts of text from a small text box. The other rankle was having to search for the Search button in too many apps.

While iOS is a closed system (every app is required to be audited by Apple) and while Android can be tailored by anyone to appear in any form across a multitude of devices, WP7 sits somewhere in the middle and there are several advantages. On the one hand people aren't forced to conform to Apple's strict rules for what's allowed and how things are distributed. On the other, phones have to have some sense of conformity and app development isn't a total free for all - a stark contrast to the variety of different-sized Android devices of varying power and software versions with an app store which is something of an unkempt mess.

As such the WP7 Marketplace is actually pretty good. More apps are appearing all the time (it's the fastest growing) but more competition needs to appear which won't just affect choice, but lower the relatively high prices (at least in some instances).

Where it's a real winner is with Games. Xbox users especially will LOVE getting Gamer Points and Achievements for playing games on their phone. With Xbox Live Arcade games being easily and increasingly-frequently ported over to WP7 there are many great titles available. With two million Xbox owners in Australia, this should be a target market, although focusing on them so may put off elements within the business market.

However, the business market will appreciate the Microsoft Office integration which no other platform can compete with. Also, the tight integration of Microsoft Exchange (email, calendars etc) is a boon, although other platforms handle this well too. My only gripe is that you can no longer sync mail directly with Outlook (as you used to be able to with previous Windows Phones). Microsoft is adamant that no one needs to anymore. I'm adamant that some do - when company security policies require a dongle to sign in, you can't automatically sync with a server.

Syncing and Social Networking

Android makes a good fist of syncing contact and social network information. HTC, in particular combines contact information from across social networks the best. Apple still has huge trouble when syncing non-Apple information and frequently duplicates contacts - I have eight separate listings for some people thanks to Apple. So it's refreshing to see that WP7 rivals HTC at combining contact information with social media details. It automatically displays contact pictures with status updates, phone numbers and email addresses from various contact sources, Facebook, Linked-In and Twitter accounts. It all happens automatically and it's easy to turn individual sources on and off.

The People stream, which combines all social media information into one stream actually works very well too - the combination with contact information works very well. Other attempts at unified social media streams often resemble train wrecks.

Looking elsewhere

My last phone test looked at the best phones of last year and concluded that the HTC Sensation XL, HTC Velocity 4G and Samsung Galaxy Nexus were the best choices if you weren't intent on having an iPhone.

But at the same time, the HTC HD7, which is now a year-and-a-half old, was still holding its own in the market. Indeed, while iOS has experienced a steady stream of new features and moved into the cloud and Android exploded into a multitude of varieties, Windows Phone 7 experienced only one major update - the move to version 7.5. The HD7 might be a little sluggish sometimes but it generally still pushes WP7 along briskly.

Value

At $699 outright the 800 is not cheap and it sits among serious competitors like the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. Online it can be had for anything between $400 and $500. Read this before buying a grey import though.

But really, the big competitor is the HTC HD7 which is still available and costs around $300 new. It doesn't have Nokia's value-add software. But do you need that?

Has Nokia cracked it this time?

The Lumia 800 is certainly the best officially-released, WP7 on the Australian market - even if it's not the best value. But frankly it's not had a good launch. It's being marketed heavily right now as Nokia's flagship phone and it was... when it launched in the rest of the world last year. However, its successor, the Lumia 900 is already on the market overseas and can already be bought in Australia from $700 (depending on how grey you are happy to grey import). It has a larger 4.3-inch screen and supports 4G LTE.

Launching an 'old' phone into a smartphone hotbed like Australia isn't very sensible. Early adopters and enthusiasts are unlikely to leap on it knowing that a better model is already available.

However, Nokia carries with it a titanic brand and an army of loyal followers who haven't embraced smartphones yet. The market is potentially huge and although other major manufacturers have created WP7 handsets, they've focused more on Android .

Windows Phone's last chance?

I really hope Nokia's phones are the spark that ignites WP7. If they aren't though, I'm certain that Windows 8 will be. The operating system uses similar tiles to WP7 and it works very well on tablets - for business and pleasure. Having a near-identical operating system on your phone, your PC and/or tablet brings huge advantages. So even if Nokia's push doesn't succeed, it's not Windows Phone's final hope.

Conclusion

Ultimately the Nokia Lumia 800 is a high-quality, very-useable phone but I can't see existing smartphone enthusiasts jumping ship to WP7 because of it. However, for the legions of Nokia users out there who haven't owned a proper smartphone before, there's a huge potential market. Let's hope Nokia doesn't stuff it up this time.