Them's Fightin' Words

My review of the Nokia Lumia 800 is drawing to a close so I figured I’d wrap things by checking out the Nokia Maps that come standard with the phone, giving a write-up of the browsing experience and covering some gripes I have with the phone (if I can think of any).

Before I jump into that though, it’s worth mentioning that after updating the phone, my battery life has vastly improved. I can now easily get a full day’s charge out of the phone with medium to heavy use, which is pretty much par for the course with most smartphones these days.

Nokia Maps

The Nokia Maps on the new Windows 7 phones are ridiculously amazing. I was already sold on Nokia Maps because when we were in Thailand earlier this year, the maps on my N8 saved our lives. There’s no way we would have been able to find our way around Thailand without J-Rab checking the maps on the back of our scooter while I did my level best not to kill us both.

On the Lumia 800, the maps have been given an impressive facelift. Everything from the way the maps render to how quickly they load has been improved and if you’re connected to a WiFi hotspot the load time is about 5 seconds at most. Like Google Maps, you have an option to switch to satellite view so you can zoom right in to where you’re standing and watch yourself waving to the camera.

Not quite, but you get the idea.

It also has a handy “places” option which will list all the rad things close to you including listed according to “Popular”, “Eat & Drink”, “Going Out”, “Sights & Museums”, “Accommodation”, “Shopping” and “Leisure & Outdoors”.

It’s also dead simple to share those locations via the networks you’re connected to so never again will you have to give directions that are utter crap to your buddy who is crap with directions – winning!

Browsing

I’ll admit to feeling my balls shrivel slightly when I found out that the default browser on the Lumia 800 is Internet Explorer, which goes some way to explaining why the browsing experience on the Lumia 800 isn’t much to write home about.

But then again, I’m not one to use my smartphone as my primary internet browsing device. Usually I’m hitting up websites to settle a drunken bet / look something up quickly and in that regard the Lumia 800 gives an OK browsing experience.

Benchmark testing has found that the iPhone is faster than the Lumia 800 when it comes to browsing and renders webpages in a much less cluttered way (I found myself zooming WAY INTO most of the sites I accessed via the Lumia 800 to try and read the text – horizontal browsing is the only way to make the experience bearable).

So yeah, the browsing is a little lacking, but like I said, if I’m surfing the interwebs for rad sheeit I’m usually doing it on a PC or my iPad so the browsing issue wasn’t a biggie for me.

Gripes

Had to really wrack my brains for this one and the only legit gripe I could come up with isn’t so much to do with the phone itself, but rather the Windows 7 phone version of WhatsApp which, even though it alerts you that a new message has come through, doesn’t immediately display that message when you go into the app to read it. You have to give it a couple of seconds to update before you see anything, which I found a bit weird.

They also killed all the rad emoticons that WhatsApp has on other platforms, so I can no longer send my buddies the throbbing purple eggplant which has become a symbol for the undying bromance we have for one another.

Otherwise I don’t really know what to say when it comes to things that irritate me about the phone because there really aren’t many.

Oh, and did I mention the fact that if you’re SMSing someone you can dictate your sms and the phone tries to figure out what you just said and writes it for you? Here, check it, I’ll use that method to dictate the final paragraph of this review to the device and faithfully write the results below:

“The single most important question any decent fun give you answers is the question what up by this phone myself. Dancer in this case is yes I would buy the Lumia 800 and I would I really enjoyed using it. This is my goodbye sweet nakia lynia 800 I’d rather say well until we meet today.”

Um… not quite Siri is it? That was supposed to say:

“The single most important question that any decent phone review answers is the question, would I buy this phone myself? The answer in this case is yes, I would buy the Lumia 800 and I would really enjoy using it. This is not goodbye my sweet Lumia 800, but rather farewell until we meet again…”

Hope you enjoyed my Lumia 800 posts, if I had to wrap it all up on one sentence I’d say if you’re a Nokia fan and PC user, I can almost guarantee you’ll enjoy using the Lumia 800.

If you’re already an Apple convert, I’m not sure why you’re even reading this.

Finish your soy latte, jump on your fixie and ride into the sunset or you’ll be late for that underground gig that band no one’s ever heard of is playing in their mom’s basement.

-ST