Nokia Lumia 900 Review

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Review: June 2012

Phone rating:

In a nutshell: The Nokia Lumia 900 looks and feels like a flagship product, with its distinctive polycarbonate design and its big 4.3 inch screen. Running Windows Phone 7.5, the Lumia does everything that a smartphone should, and has a great camera too. It's a heavy phone though.

Best buy: *Free* from BuyMobilePhones (Black).

The Nokia Lumia 900 is an upgraded version of the Lumia 800. It has all the power and features of the 800, with an enlarged 4.3 inch screen instead of the decidedly mid-range 3.7 inch screen on the 800. Apart from that welcome change, pretty much everything else remains the same.

The Lumia 900 is Nokia's flagship phone, and its design reflects that. The phone is crafted from a seamless slab of polycarbonate that gives it a unique and futuristic look. The phone is heavy though - very heavy in fact - and the phone is larger than it needs to be, with a seemingly wasted space of several millimetres around the screen edge. It's also a couple of millimetres thicker than rival phones, although the bevelled edges make it feel narrower. We like the look of the phone in black, but it's also available in white and blue.

The 4.3 inch display is a good one. It's a capacitive AMOLED screen that uses Nokia's ClearBlack technology. Contrast and brightness are very good indeed and the 480 x 800 pixel resolution is sharp.

The Lumia runs Windows Phone 7.5 (aka Mango). Mango is a great operating system in so many ways. We like the "living tiles" interface, with its interactive tiles that update themselves automatically with facebook notifications, weather forecasts, missed calls, or whatever. It's a powerful OS, yet easier to use than Android. Although it lacks the sheer number of apps of Android and iOS, those apps it has are of high quality. You get a lot of pre-installed apps too, such as Internet Explorer 9, Office, etc.

The phone has a top-notch camera too. Car Zeiss optics plus a large f2.2 aperture to maximise light, and an 8 megapixel sensor make the camera performance superior to most other camera phones. Add in touch autofocus and a double LED flash, and you'll find that your digicam is left gathering dust on the shelf. The camera can record video in HD resolution and there's also a secondary front-facing camera ready for making video calls.

The music player is powerful and user-friendly, although it has to be said that not everyone likes the Zune software that comes with Windows Phone. The same criticism could be levelled at Apple's iTunes software too, of course. Sound quality is good and an FM radio adds to the choice.

The Lumia 900 is strong at navigation, with Wi-Fi-assisted GPS and both Bing Maps and Nokia Maps installed. Nokia Drive gives turn-by-turn directions and works well.

The phone is powered by a fast single core 1.4GHz processor. While top-end Android rivals have quad-core power, Mango doesn't support multi-core at all. Nevertheless, with additional hardware for graphics acceleration the phone feels fast and responsive.

The built-in memory is 16GB, which ought to be more than adequate for the majority of users. There's no microSD card option though - a restriction of Windows Phone - so if you find you run out of memory, there's not much you can do about it, other than use a cloud storage solution such as DropBox.

The phone supports quadband GSM plus quadband 3G with HSPA offering download speeds to a theoretical maximum of 42Mbps. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and USB are available, and there's a 3.5mm headphone jack as well.

When it comes to battery life, Nokia say that the 900 has an "All day" battery life. You might have thought that was a minimum requirement, really. In reality it will give most users longer than just one day. It's certainly a lot better than the poor battery life of the Lumia 800.

Overall we like the Lumia 900 very much. Everything that was good about the Lumia 800 is here, plus a bigger screen and improved battery life. As far as Windows Phones go, this is probably the best. For the same price, however, you could get a HTC One S, Sony Xperia S or an iPhone 4.

Features of the Nokia Lumia 900 include:

Windows Phone 7.5 Mango operating system
1400 MHz Qualcomm processor
8 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, autofocus, dual LED flash, f2.2, 3x digital zoom
Video camera: HD quality 720p resolution, 30 frames/second, 3x digital zoom
1 megapixel front camera for video calling (VGA resolution)
Display: AMOLED ClearBlack capacitive touchscreen, 16 million colours, 480 x 800 pixels (4.3 inches) with Gorilla Glass
Media player
Stereo FM radio
aGPS with Bing Maps, Nokia Maps and Nokia Drive
MP3, AAC & WMA ringtones
Integrated hands-free speaker
Messaging: SMS, MMS, email (support for attachments)
Java games with hardware graphics acceleration
Processor: Single core 1400MHz
Memory: 16GB plus 512MB RAM
Connectivity: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR, micro USB 2.0, modem, 3.5 mm stereo headphone plug
Data: WAP, EGPRS class B, WCDMA/HSPA (42 Mbps download, 5.76 Mbps upload)
Internet: HTML5 web browser (Internet Explorer 9 Mobile)
Key applications: Notes, Calendar, Detailed contact information
Quadband GSM plus 3G WCDMA 850/900/1900/2100
Size: 128 x 69 x 11.5 mm
Weight: 160g
1830mAh battery
Talktime: 7 hours
Battery standby: 300 hours

Nokia Lumia 900 User Reviews

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Average rating from 5 reviews:

Reviewed by Demola from Nigeria on 4th May 2013
I really like the phone,but the PC suit is rubbish.It took me a while to figure out the bluetooth doesn't work when sending media file nor can you use for music as your ringtone.
I think Window/Nokia has to find a solution to that. I mean,I jump off the iPhone wagon because of this bluetooth and Ringtone issues.
Please NokiA I want my music as ringtones.......HELP !!!!
Rating: Reply

Reviewed by Tris from Uk on 3rd Nov 2012
I have waited 3 months to write this review. First off I had the lumia 800. Was very happy for the first few weeks untill the phone started letting me down. I had battery trouble, connection problems. Problems with the network provider not fixing the problems. All in all it lead me to cancel 3 contracts over the lumia 800. I then bought a iPhone 4....... Problem was I had really come to love windows phone and thought iOS was out of touch with the times. I also missed using Nokia drive and music. I took a gamble and sold my iPhone and bought the lumia 900 direct from Nokia. I have been using it for the past 3 months and what can I say....... I'm really happy with it. It's the phone I wanted the 800 to be. Sure it's larger, but it's well designed so it has that same premium feel. It isn't a pentile display so for the same resolution it looks just as good as the 800 if not slightly better. Nothing to say about wp7.5 running on it. It's flawless of course. It's had a tweak on home screen scrolling to slow it a little, but I think this adds to the premium feel. It's not so choppy at high speed scrolling. Unlike the 800 the 900 has a 1850 mhp battery ,so this provides plenty of juice. I can get 1.5 days easy. Both cameras work fine and social networking is a breeze. Nokia have redeemed themselves with me. I guess in every batch of phones there is always a bad one. It seems I have found a really good one this time. I cant fault it.......... And it looks beautiful. If there is one small gripe then it would be its not going to get wp8..... But that's down to only having a single core CPU. It will however be receiving we 7.8 and will see it through with new features. All in all very happy.
Rating: Reply

Reply by Tris from UK on 9th Feb 2013
Maybe its true to say but of all the mobiles out there only Nokia has real soul. Got the 820 a few weeks back and in every day use I still prefer my white 900. Goes to show if it can perform well enough maybe its not all about the tech. Everyone always says.... Wow, what phone is that... Looks real cool:-D

Reviewed by Nokia Fan from UK on 26th Jul 2012
I have similar views to LM1980's comments.

I've had the original iPhone, the 3GS, 4 and tried the jailbreak option to put siri on the iPhone 4 instead of getting the 4S.

Although the iPhone is a good phone, there are some cracks in the pavement due to the restrictions apple have placed on it. Hence jailbreaking. However, I jailbreaked my iPhone 4 and when I took it to my local Apple store due to dreadful battery life they refused to do anything. I had wiped of the jailbreak and reinstalled iOS 5.1.1 but they said they knew it had been jailbroken. I was denied anything under warranty. They charged me to do a diagnostic on it. No idea what they did but my battery life decreased after this to the point that even with the sim card removed and no wifi or bluetooth turned on the battery dropped 20% in 2 hours when not used.

Oh yeah, this is a review on the Lumia 900.

A cracking phone. Cannot fault it in anyway. Great handset, great windows phone OS.

Do I have anything bad to say about it..............Yeah I suppose there is one thing. The marketplace is a little bare compared to Android or iPhone app stores, but this isn't a negative on the handset.

Not sure why this website reviewed it and gave it only 4 stars. 5 stars from me and I imagine many more who get it.

Ditch your iPhones, stop being a sheep.
Rating: Reply

Reply by Tris from uk on 3rd Nov 2012
I couldn't agree more.

Reviewed by LM1980 from UK on 25th Jul 2012
Having had a lot of high end smartphones over the past 5 years or so I have never been totally satisfied wit any of them. Battery life of a smartphone is never you going to match that of an old basic Nokia. However there things that are a must. A decent OS and a fast processor.

Before having the Lumia 900 I would hah said the iPhone 3gs was my favourite. I have had an iPhone 4 but comparing the IOS 5.1.1 to 4.3.3 on both I'd go for the 3gs with 4.3.3.

The Nokia Lumia 900 is a great phone and combine windows phone OS it is, in my opinion better than the iPhone 4/4s and anything else from HTC or Samsung.

Not found any issues with it yet. Battery life is good. My iPhone 4 would have been on charge by now with the amount of usage I've given the Lumia.
Rating: Reply

Reviewed by stuart bolden from uk on 5th Jul 2012
Ive just "purchased" this phone on a contract(another one).
I previously tried the Sony Experia S, which is a nice handset. Ive had iphones (including a couple of 4s) but i have to say that the Nokia Lumia 900 is ,my favourite handset.It took a couple of hours to get my head round the fact that i don't have seven "home" screens now,but the look of the "tiled" Nokia screen really is superb.The 8mp camera is pretty standard these days and it doesn't disappoint.
The handsets weight, which you gave a negative comment to,in my opinion actually enhances the feel of the phone. It looks an expensive piece of kit and similarly feels like it too.
I was a bit weary of changing to a "windows " phone having used both Android and Iphone systems, but i neednt have worried. In fact its refreshingly different to warrant the switch.
I would give the phone 5 stars , its a personal opinion , i know , but i really like the device.
Rating: Reply

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