Nokia Lumia 800 review

Battery life

The Nokia Lumia 800 we were provided for our original review lasted a day before showing the critical battery warning.

It lasted marginally longer when we updated the software, which was supposed to fix the issue completely, and after the latest Microsoft OS and Nokia FW updates the battery remains good enough to last up to one day between charges. This is a slight improvement, but in practice it's still worse than other phones on the market.

The one great improvement provided in the last Nokia FW update is the ability to recharge the Nokia Lumia 800 from empty without the use of a PC to force it to wake up, and the ability to make better use of Nokia's charging technology to enable speedier transfers.

However, we've got good news: there's another update that's popped up in Singapore that's said to double (that's right, double) the Nokia Lumia 800 battery life. Whether that will be the case in real use, we've yet to see... but we're crossing our fingers and will update the review when we are able to.

We were using the Mix Radio a fair bit, and on occasion enjoyed a movie session - but even then, the battery drain was too high, with around four hours of video obliterating the power pack to critical levels.

When we compare the specifications the competition is interesting with the Nokia Lumia 800 achieving 780 minutes GSM talk time and 265hrs GSM standby in comparison to 410 minutes and 460hrs from the HTC Titan.

The overall standby times may be down to the Nokia Lumia 800's 1450mAh battery compared with the HTC Titan's 1600mAh offering.

Charging of the Nokia Lumia 800 is achieved via its single micro-USB connector enabling charging via mains adaptor or PC USB, keeping things simple. A nice touch is the offset hinge rocker mechanism on the micro-USB cover making opening the cover a lot easier than previous devices.

Press on the raised area next to the headphone socket and the other end of the cover pops out. No more trying to hook your fingers under a tiny ridge.

To aid battery management there is an option in the phone settings to turn on battery saver automatically when the battery level drops below a pre-set figure, switching certain services off like automatic email retrieval and background applications.

Connectivity

As usual the Nokia Lumia 800 comes packaged with a USB to micro-USB cable for charging and physical connection for synchronisation and data transfer.

In addition to its hard connectivity the Nokia Lumia 800 supports Bluetooth 2.1 +EDR, and Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n with the usual WEP, WPA, WPA2 (Enterprise & Personal) methods available.

The first time the Nokia Lumia 800 is connected to a PC the standard automatic driver setup occurs followed by a request to install Microsoft Zune software which is Microsoft's response to iTunes providing access enabling synchronisation of music and video between PC and phone.

We're still very disappointed in the lack of drag and drop options for the Zune interface on the PC - we want to just chuck songs and movies on our device through a standard Windows Explorer interface without having to spend ages synchronising them over, but Microsoft is having none of it.

Obviously, you can drag and drop the files within the Zune application to the little phone icon in the corner, but unless you fancy faffing around with third party applications, this is the only way you can manage it - in the same way as iTunes.

So if you want to plop a video on the device or simply bung over a few tracks from an obscure folder, you'll need to select the relevant items in the Zune player and wait ages (especially in the case of video) to get them across. Even though the system says it accepts MP4, our files were clearly in the wrong codec and couldn't be played without copious conversion.

However, the same files were instantly playable on the Galaxy S2 - why Nokia (well, in fairness, Microsoft) has to be so convoluted, we don't know.

One thing we do like is the ability to wirelessly sync: if your phone and PC are on and plugged in (and connected to the same network) any items you've flagged for syncing will automatically jump across while you sleep - if you don't turn off your computer at night, that is.