Nokia Lumia 900 Review

The Nokia Lumia 900 is the first high-end flagship Windows Phone for the U.S. from Nokia. The phone exclusive to AT&T is set to bring the Finnish phone maker back to the United States with a bang. Do they accomplish this?

Nokia Hardware: Well crafted beauty and power

When you first look at the Lumia 900 you will notice its all uni-body design made from a single polycarbonate mold. While that prevents the ability to have a removal battery and expandable storage you can’t help but appreciate the beautiful design and how comfortable it feels in your hand. There is a 4.3 inch ClearBlack AMOLED display that makes everything you view look great and pop out even in direct sunlight. Under the hood there is a 1.4 Ghz single-core processor that keeps the Windows Phone experience smooth, 512 MB, 16 GB of storage, 4G LTE, HSPA+ 21 Mbps, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS and a 1840 mAH battery. For cameras you get a 1 megapixel front facing camera a 8 megapixel rear facing camera with dual led flash and 720p HD video capture.  Nokia packs the Lumia 900 with plenty of power.

Nokia Apps: Drive, Transit, Maps comes to Windows Phone

The partnership between Microsoft and Nokia brings exclusive benefits Nokia Drive, Nokia Maps and Nokia Transit are very popular apps on Nokia’s Symbian and MeeGo devices that have been brought over to Windows Phone 7.  Nokia Drive brings full true turn-by-turn GPS navigation with offline map support and solid performance. Nokia Transit gives you you’re city entire transit schedule in hand with exact minute accuracy in my test on a recent trip into downtown. Nokia Maps is a much more robust map program than Bing Maps and even includes local scout type functionality.

While each of these app perform well and replace and even fill in missing elements of native Metro UI interface. Nokia Transit is the only one that fully uses Metro UI while the other apps have some elements of it and they feel more like ports that native applications to the platform. There is also a lack of synergy between all three apps. For example you can’t search for something in Nokia Maps and then hit a button to instantly open up Nokia Drive to navigate there. Still with these few flaws you will be satisfied with them.

The Lumia 900’s camera is only held back by Microsoft’s Software

Nokia is well-known for put high quality cameras in their phones and the Lumia 900 continues this with its 8 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss lens and f2.2. The still image and video quality you get is the best out of any Windows Phone. You get crystal clear images with great color reproduction and the audio with video is clear and audible. Even with all this you feel that the camera is being held back because of the lack of Nokia’s camera software. You are regulated to using only the Windows Phone camera app and while they are decent controls it’s no where near the robust features that you get with Nokia’s software which give you close to digital camera controls. Microsoft needs to open the camera controls more for 3rd party development.

The front facing camera has a wide lens which lets you see more people in a chat. You can fit up to two people in the camera and have a smooth clear video chat.

4G LTE Is Fast With Good Battery Life

Nokia and Microsoft had to figure out a way to solve the LTE battery issue. While LTE is blazing fast data speeds it’s lately been coming at the cost of poor battery life. While I had initial worries about this when this phone was first announced I can safley say that this will not be an issue for Windows Phone. With heavy usage of e-mail, data, music and GPS the battery will last you about 8 hours which is a full work shift. If you don’t use too much GPS navigation throughout the day you can score about 10 and if your moderate across the board you can get  a solid 15 hours which will cover the whole day for most people.

Now as far as the LTE goes its speeds are a welcome edition to Windows Phone with our speeds going between 5 Mbps – 18 Mbps download and 4 Mbps – 8 Mbps for uploads. These are great speeds for internet sharing and hostpot usage which is enabled on the Lumia 900 and can support up to 5 device and provides a solid and consistent connection of 4G LTE and HSPA+.

Speaking of connection the cell phone connection on the Lumia 900 performed well with no dropped calls and clear audio on both sides of the call. The LTE would drop out and then quickly reconnect when not in use which seems to be a common thing for LTE devices.

The Nokia Lumia 900 Is  Best Windows Phone Available In the U.S

AT&T scores a sweet exclusive with the Lumia 900 and for the price tag of just $99 this is the best valued smartphone anywhere. You get the best hardware with solid, lag free and consistent user experience of Windows Phone and true 4G connection with LTE. I do wish that you could replace the battery and add storage which are key features for the power users but this phone isn’t just aim for that demographics its for all users across the board.  Nokia has given Windows Phone the hardware it needs to compete now Microsoft needs to bring the software up another notch to match it. The Nokia Lumia 900 hands down the best Windows Phone available in the U.S. market.