Review: Nokia Lumia 900

The Nokia Lumia 900 is the latest phone in Nokia's flagship range. The company has followed the 'bigger is better' trend, introducing a larger screen (4.3 inches, compared to the Lumia 800's 3.7 inches).

However, users hoping for additional storage are likely to be disappointed that the Lumia only offers 16GB of internal storage, and this is not upgradeable.

The Nokia Lumia 900 has been available in SA for some time now, but while Nokia recently slashed the Lumia 900's contract price in half on AT&T, the price cut hasn't, as yet, made its way to SA. The Lumia is available locally at the recommended retail price of R7 999.

The soon-to-be-released Windows Phone 8 also won't be coming to the Lumia 900, which is seen as a blow to the handset. In fact, World Wide Worx MD Arthur Goldstuck has argued that consumers that are aware of this will not buy the Lumia 900.

The Nokia Lumia 900 is a gorgeous phone with a narrow chassis and a sizeable screen. It follows the polycarbonate unibody design of its predecessor, giving it a streamlined feel, although the phone is not small. Then again, the narrow design balances nicely with the length of the phone.

The phone is rather heavy, at 160g, but it comes with a spacious AMOLED screen and a 1.4GHz processor.

The matte black plastic back cover is ever so slightly textured - a welcome departure from phones with slippery surfaces that are inclined to cause the phone to slip out of the user's hands. The rounded edges on the left and right of the phone ensure it sits comfortably in the hand.

The Nokia Lumia 900 runs on Windows Phone 7.

Instead of icons displaying apps, as found with iOS, Android and even BlackBerry, the Windows 7 OS comprises square live tiles. I think users will either love or hate the live tiles - I loved them. I think the interface is refreshingly different to Android and iOS, which I find incredibly similar.

Navigation on the Lumia 900 is also wonderfully fluid and allows for a good deal of customisation. Users can pin apps to the start menu or home screen by simply pressing down on the app and selecting the 'pin to start' option. Other options include 'rate and review', as well as 'uninstall'.

Once apps are pinned, they appear in the start menu as updateable live tiles. For example, the People tile will update with photos and social media feeds, giving the home screen a dynamic feel.

The phone has great call quality - even when switching to speaker mode, the sound is crystal clear.

The Nokia Lumia 900 comes with Internet Explorer. Provided the phone has good reception, the browser is pretty fast. Pinch scrolling, coupled with the responsive touch-screen, make browsing an absolute pleasure.

Smartphone users won't be too disappointed with the battery life, given that it lasts a good day-and-a-half under heavy usage After all, this is the price that comes with smartphone functionality.

The AMOLED display is stunning, with bright, sharp images. The 800x480-pixel resolution works well with the live tiles, resulting in a vibrant display. The generous screen size also ensures apps are easily distinguishable.

Of course, the 4.3-inch screen also makes the touch-screen that much more bearable.

The screen is incredibly responsive, and turning it on its side results in a sizeable display for watching videos and viewing images.

The phone comes with front- and rear-facing cameras. Nokia has signed a partnership with Carl Zeiss, which lets it use the company's lenses in its phones.

The camera is a generous 8MP and also gives users a good deal of control over settings. The phone lets users adjust zoom and exposure and even ISO (which ranges from 100 to 800), white balance and contrast levels.

The camera also has predefined settings or 'scenes' users can choose from, including beach, candlelight, landscape, night, portrait, snow and sport.

I was pretty pleased with the camera, which takes better-than-average photos and completely blew my own phone's camera out of the water. If anything, colours were slightly over-saturated, but this actually resulted in gorgeously vivid photographs, even if they weren't true to the actual colours photographed.

Avid photographers may turn up their noses at the Lumia camera, but as an amateur, I was pretty impressed.

However, I have to say that I was a wee bit disappointed that the camera did not have a panoramic function, but then you can't have everything.

The Lumia comes with the Creative Studio photo-editing suite, which is so easy to use that even amateurs should feel comfortable with it. The suite comes with face warps that let users do weird and wonderful things to portrait photos. Well, mostly weird things, like distortion.

Users can also add filters, called “life styles” to their photos. These are pre-displayed, which is a nice feature that displays a photo with each filter in a single photo stream.

The suite also lets users make adjustments to photos, including cropping and rotating photos, and tweaking contrast rations, colour and sharpness.

Throwing one's chips in with Microsoft comes with some perks, including Microsoft Office. As such, the phone comes with mobile versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Users can also make use of Microsoft SkyDrive to sync any documents created on their Nokia Lumias with their PCs. Users can also share documents created in the Office suite via e-mail.

The Calendar is another great feature for business use. Scheduling appointments within the Calendar app is made simple with quick navigation between months and days.

The phone also comes with Nokia's native map app, Nokia Drive, which lets users download maps for over 190 countries. It's a great app for travellers, and one that will come in handy when travelling to destinations that have three different spellings for just about every street name (Bangkok, I'm looking at you).

In truth, the Nokia Lumia does not come preloaded with the wealth of apps usually found on Android phones. However, there is a shortcut to the Market Place, where users can buy additional Windows 7 apps, as well as a shortcut to the Xbox store, where users will find mobile Xbox titles as well as popular mobile games, like Angry Birds. In addition to the Market Place and Xbox store, users can access Nokia's Zune store, where they can purchase music and videos.

As already mentioned, the Lumia 900 comes with a puny 16GB of internal storage and no external SD slot to beef this up. Having said that, Windows Live users who download the Sky Drive app will get an additional 25GB of cloud storage.

The Nokia Lumia 900 is a definite contender for people looking to buy a high-end smartphone. The phone has a great interface and a fairly decent camera.

However, given the dearth of apps available in the Market Place store when compared to Apple's iTunes store and the Android Play store, one has to wonder whether the Lumia 900 can compete. One also has to wonder whether future apps added to the Market Place will be compatible with Windows 7.8, which will be introduced for the Lumia 900 at a later stage.

To add salt to the wound, the Lumia 900 is not upgradeable to the much-talked-about Windows Phone 8 OS. Like, not ever. Period.