Nokia Lumia 900 Cell Phone Review

Using the Nokia Lumia 900

Using the Lumia 900 is a very pleasant experience. The touchscreen responds quickly and precisely. All actions on the phone respond exactly the way you would expect. Booting takes less than 20 seconds. The AMOLED screen of the Lumia 900 is substantially brighter than the LCD screen we saw on the Lumia 710.

After some hours of experimentation, we found that the Windows Phone 7.5 is extremely friendly, easy to use, and powerful. It uses the tiles that are also found on Windows 8’s Modern UI (“Metro”) interface. Those tiles (squares and rectangles) are customizable (you can move or delete any of them from the main screen, as well as include any application on it) and dynamic, being capable of showing information from the applications. For example, the “People” square shows a slideshow with your contacts’ photos.

Speaking of contacts, the first step after powering up the phone for the first time is to log in (or create) a Microsoft Live account. If you log in by an existing account, your contacts are imported to the phone. There is no phonebook apart from your Internet contacts. This may sound strange at first, but after some use, you’ll realize that this device is actually a communications hub, not only a mobile phone where all you need to do is store the name and phone number of the people you know.

Just touch a tile to run the application, or scroll vertically to see more icons. You can also scroll the screen to the left to see all of the installed applications. The color of the icons can be changed as well as having the choice of a black or white background.

Figure 9: Main screen

Figure 10 shows the list of installed applications, which is always in alphabetical order. Pressing and holding an application icon for a while, you can pin any application on the start screen, or uninstall it.

Figure 10: List of applications

Some features are the same as on the iOS, such as the app store, called Marketplace. You can install any of the apps and games available, many of them for free. Popular apps such as Facebook, YouTube, Skype, Tuneln, etc., are easily found, as well as numerous useful (well, some of them not so useful) applications. There are also some Nokia exclusive applications on the Nokia collection section.

Figure 11: Marketplace

The gaming menu on the Nokia Lumia 900 is connected to the Xbox LIVE network, so you have to use your account (or create one). When we configured it, the phone imported the animated avatar we created at an Xbox 360 console.

Most of the games available are Xbox LIVE games, besides classical Windows games (Solitaire and Minesweeper are there), but there are also lots of third-party games available.

Figure 12: Games menu

The way to access the phone’s storage may not please all users. We particularly like to connect a phone to the PC and access its storage space as an external drive, but on the Nokia Lumia 900, it is impossible. The only way to exchange data between the phone and your PC is by using a software called Zune, which is somewhat similar to Apple’s iTunes.

You can also transfer data using Skydrive, a virtual drive from Microsoft that resembles Apple’s iCloud.

The battery lasted around two days under moderate use. It can last three days with very light use, with a few calls and no app usage. However, when we used it for hours to surf the web or play games, the battery was drained by the next morning, which means a charge will not last for two days under heavy usage.