The Windows Phone 8 makes the Windows Phone 7.5 Mango-based Lumia 900 obsolete. Still, is it worth your hard-earned cash? The specs and OS on new devices matter, but the average mobile phone buyer, who might indulge in an impulse buy while browsing through a mobile store, cares far more about the general look and feel. This is precisely what the Nokia Lumia 900 offers – a design that is as good as the iPhone's (if not better), and arguably the best user interface, in the form of live tiles.
The Lumia 900 gets the same polycarbonate shell design borrowed from the N9 and the Lumia 800. The Lumia 900, however, features a larger screen at 4.3 inches, but a slightly lower pixel density at 217 pixels per inch compared to that of the 800. The non-Pentile AMOLED screen with ClearBlack Display ensures that your viewing experience remains just as good.
The Windows Phone Metro UI is one of the most visually pleasing and easy to use UIs we have seen on smartphones in a long time. It makes Android and iOS platforms look plain ugly in comparison. And thanks to the single-core Snapdragon processor clocked to 1.4 GHz and all of 512 MB RAM to support it, apps and games run smoothly on the device with zero lag, no matter what you throw at it. Impressive.
The only negatives for the platform are the fact that it 'only' has around 100,000 apps on offer (iOS has over five times that number). Another irritant is the fact that multi-tasking is limited only to the last six apps you were using. In contrast, it has one of the best implementations of social network integration we have ever seen on any platform and the user experience is enhanced with a multitude of features in the ‘People’ and ‘Me’ tiles.
The 8 MP camera at the rear with dual-LED flash shoots at 720p, but we loved the clarity and detailing in the images and videos. Clever apps like Camera Extras come to the rescue to make every photograph stunning. That said, we must admit that the camera on this device still has come catching up to do when it comes to Samsung and HTC devices. The Lumia 900 also boasts of the first secondary front-facing 1.3 MP camera on a Lumia device, which ensures you can enjoy video calling as well as video chats with Skype on the device.
As for the battery, 1830 mAh is a step up from the Lumia 800 and could last you an entire day of average usage. This is impressive, considering the fact that most of the flagship Android devices falter in this department.
In our opinion, the Lumia 900 is a good first choice smartphone for the average man on the street; this actually forms the larger pie of the smartphone market. But the trick here for Nokia is to price the Lumia 900 aggressively, given the fact that it still lags behind top Android handsets and the iPhone when it comes to sheer hardware specs and an ecosystem of apps. Hence, we'd say the device would be a value for money proposition
only if it is priced below the Rs 25,000 mark. Our recommendation: wait and watch.
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