Nokia Lumia 800 hands-on preview and live pictures roundup

You can place your pre-order now and wait all of one to four weeks for your brand new Nokia Lumia 800 to arrive just to see how well (or poorly) it actually performs, or you can use the links I've collected and lined up below to find out what some of the biggest names in the blogosphere think about it after having used it today. The consensus seems to be that the changes made to the Nokia N9 that are present in the Lumia 800 are mostly welcome ones, although some people are bound to see some of these as "downgrades" (i.e. the lack of a front-facing camera, the screen going down in size from 3.9- to 3.7-inches, etc.). Feel free to draw your own conclusion by reading any one of the articles below.

With New Smartphones, High Hopes for Nokia and Microsoft (via NYT)
Nokia's first Windows Phones: What's there, what's not (via All About Microsoft)
Nokia Lumia 800 pictures and hands-on (via Pocket-Lint)
Nokia Lumia 800 pictures, video, and hands-on preview (via ThisIsMyNext)
Nokia Lumia 800 hands-on (video) (via Engadget)

Nokia World 2011 news roundup: Announcement of Lumia 710 and Lumia 800 Mango smartphones, S40 Asha Range, Monster Purity HD Stereo headphones, and more

October 25 just might go down in history as the day that Nokia took the power back from Apple, Google, and all Android device makers in the worldwide smartphone arena. This year's Nokia World expo in London saw the introduction of not one, but two Windows Phone Mango powered smartphones from Nokia. These are the Nokia Lumia 710 and the Nokia Lumia 800. Meanwhile, Nokia also took the time to launch a total of four new Series 40-powered feature phones, an entire range of new handsets, and these are the Nokia Asha 200, Nokia Asha 201, Nokia Asha 300, and Nokia Asha 303. Also announced were two new headphones from Monster as part of a new Purity HD Stereo headphone line.

So now that the proverbial cat is out of the bag, what's next for Nokia? Since virtually none of the products that were just announced are going to make it market until next month at least, you and I are going to have to wait for a bit to see what happens next. I've seen Windows Phone Mango in action, and I know it's a platform that holds a lot of promise. I think Series 40 has evolved in the right direction, so it deserves to be kept alive in more Nokia feature phones in the future. As far as tech specs go, the new Nokia devices announced today could have been better. But slightly tweaking the N9 to have a smaller screen, better processor, and switching to Windows Phone Mango instead of MeeGo... this might actually be the right move after all.

Anyway, it's really too early to say for sure whether or not Nokia will succeed with its new strategy. I side with what Neil Mawston (an analyst at Strategy Analytics in Milton Keynes, England) said in a recent interview with the New York Times: “One thing I have learned in this business is to never say never.” (Funny guy, he just said 'never' twice.)

Nokia Lumia 800, the 'first real Windows Phone' now official

Nokia has just finished officially unveiling one of its most leaked handsets in recent memory at the recently concluded Nokia World Expo in London, England. Pictured above, the Nokia Lumia 800 is referred to by Nokia as the world's first real Windows Phone. Now I know what you're thinking, it looks like a bar of soap. Well, perhaps it does, but this bar of soap just might be the kind of thing that Nokia needs to rub down its long streak of bad luck in the smartphone arena of today.

The Nokia Lumia 800 features a 1.4GHz Qualcomm MSM8255 SoC, the same chip that powers mobile heavyweights such as the HTC Desire HD, Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc, and Acer Iconia Smart. It also comes with an Adreno 205 GPU as standard for its configuration as part of the Snapdragon family. The body of the Nokia Lumia 800 is made out of a thick piece of durable polycarbonate plastic, and its design is reminiscent of the Nokia N9. It's a bit on the chunky side at 12.1mm thick, but I wouldn't hesitate to pick this baby up even if it were truly a bar of soap (if you know what I mean).

Up front, there appears to be nothing but the curved 3.7-inch 800x480 ClearBlack AMOLED touchsreen display (standard with most Windows Phones nowadays), and around the back, the only thing you'll find is an 8-megapixel snapper with Carl Zeiss optics. There will be only one version of the Nokia Lumia 800 for sale and it will offer 16GB of internal storage (plus 25GB of free SkyDrive storage from Microsoft).

If you head on over to Nokia's web site right now, you'll find a list of select countries where it's already available for pre-order. Come November, it will be officially available in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK under leading telecom operators and select retailers. Meanwhile, Hong Kong, India, Russia, Singapore, and Taiwan will see each see a local release of the Nokia Lumia 800 before the year ends. Availability in other countries (read: rest of world) is scheduled to follow in early 2012.

Impressive hardware as always. But will Windows Phone be enough to salvage what remains of the former champion of Symbian? If you're thinking of bagging one of these for Christmas, expect to pay €420 or about $585 USD (~25,000 Pesos) Read on for a few more photos and the official press release of the Nokia Lumia 800 smartphone.