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Nokia Lumia 900
9.0
final rating

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Criteria Comments Rating
  • Reception and call quality Better than my iPhone and Evo. great!
  • Display First thing I noticed in the showroom. Just the right size to maximize screen without making you feel like you're holding a cafeteria tray up to your ear. great!
  • Battery life Too early to say, really, but seems not as good as my iPhone but worlds better than the EVO 4G. good
  • Camera Again, a bit early to say, but feels not quite as good as iPhone. Was hoping for better, given the Carl Zeiss lens. Perhaps apps will make a difference, good
  • Ease of use My wife LOVES it, and she has zero patience combined with innate techno-hatred. She spurned the EVO; nixed iPhone. This is the Goldilocks phone. great!
  • Design and form factor We both find it very comfortable to hold and use. great!
  • Portability (size / weight) See "ease of use." Hits the sweet spot. great!
  • Media support Fantastic integration with Facebook, Gmail, YouTube and hotmail contacts. Tango surprisingly excellent. superb.No Skype in background costs it one point. good
  • Durability So far so good. Wife very tough on phones. I may be optimistic here. great!
  • Ecosystem (apps, accessories, etc.) Biggest negative for WP7. For me, the iPhone apps and ecosystem are the gold standard. Doesn't matter as much to my wife, for whom apps are much less important. so-so
Detailed review
My wife has been through MANY phones, all of which she has hated, most recently a Blackberry Bold, a Nokia C6 and our EVO 4G. She has an iPad and loves it, but insists the iPhone keyboard is impossible to work. I bought an EVO 4G for our house phone, so that she could learn Android and see if were right for her. It wasn't. Got her the Nokia C6 as a stand-in, because it had a keyboard and was affordable unlocked. We both hated the Symbian OS, which seemed downright sadistic, bringing new levels of meaning to the word "unintuitive." When WP7 first came out, I had an inkling that this might be our Goldilocks phone -- easy to learn and powerful to use. I counseled her to wait until the Nokia efforts emerged, and was not disappointed by the Lumia 900. After lots of agonizing, discussions with friends and so forth, she consented to a trip to our local AT&T franchise store, where she has done business for many years. The Lumia 900 was love at first sight -- loved the look, adored the screen and hallelujah, SHE COULD OPERATE THE KEYBOARD. I of course was assigned setup duty, which turned out to be a piece of cake -- easier even than an iPhone, which I can do in my sleep by now. Microsoft really has done their homework here and the result is a phone that honestly is joy to use. I'm especially impressed with their integration of all her various Gmail, hotmail and Facebook contacts -- in about 30 seconds, they all were playing nice on one team. The only downside so far has been expected shallowness of the app ecosystem. This isn't an issue for my wife, who never has been an app-hound. rdio, Evernote, Facebook, LastPass, Kindle and Microsoft Office are plenty for her so far. We'll see about the future, but if she's happy, I'm ecstatic. AT LAST a smart phone that's smart enough to be simple for an impatient technophobe! P.S. Great sign -- on her first day alone with the phone, she added two apps on her own and started using them. You cannot imagine what a breakthrough this is!
review history
2012-06-10
Edited comment on Media support
Updated detailed review

Comments (1) subscribe to this review's comments

usercf49d9f498d

usercf49d9f498d

Thanks, John. If Windows Phone keeps up its pace of adding crucial apps (Pandora, please -- the 3rd party app that I purchased doesn't work), this really could replace iPhone as "the phone for the rest of us." Great looking, sturdy, VERY reliable and all-in-all the must UN-frustrating SmartPhone on the market, IMO.
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