Nokia Lumia 900 May Be The Single Best Phone

Nokia announced the anticipated Lumia 900 smartphone earlier this week at the Consumer Electronics Show, and we decided to spend some well-needed hands-on time with the device.

Simply put, the Nokia Lumia 900 may be the single best phone Nokia has produced in years. It features a beautiful 4.3-inch AMOLED Clear Black display that makes Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system pop. For specs, it has a single-core 1.4-GHz processor, an 8-megapixel camera with an LED flash and a front-facing camera for video conferencing. (Read more about the Lumia 900′s specs in our product database.) While it’s disappointing that the processor is only single-core, Windows Phone’s lightweight OS makes it very responsive.

While I was a fan of some early smartphones from Nokia, the Symbian OS looked clunky and way outdated compared to iOS and Android of recent years. The Finnish company certainly knows how to make sexy hardware — it was just software that it struggled with. The Windows Phone operating system, while not exactly popular, is a staggering improvement, and that counts for all three officially-announced Nokia phones with the Windows Phone OS.

The Lumia 900, if you’ve been paying attention, is like the big brother to the previously announced Lumia 800. The 900 has a larger screen than the 800′s 3.7-inch display, and adds a front-facing camera. It also blows away the less-expensive budget model, the Lumia 710, which has only a 5-megapixel camera.

I really like the feel of the Nokia 900, more so than the 800 and the cheaper 710 model, mostly because of the screen size. The 4.3-inch screen makes a lot of sense with Windows Phone’s Mango OS. Flicks between screens are fast, fluid and responsive. I also like the first two color choices for the 900, black and cyan.
While the phone has no official price or release date, a Nokia representative said the device would be out in the “spring” on AT&T exclusively. If we had to take an educated guess, the Lumia 900 will likely run $199 with a 2-year contract.

Phones aren’t the main focus of the CES this week but one caught my eye as the best of those in attendance. Nokia showed off the Lumia 900, and it looks like a fantastic Windows Phone with outstanding hardware, design, and software. The Lumia 900 will be coming to AT&T in the U. S. and is the best Nokia phone since the partnership with Microsoft with Windows Phone.

The clean hardware design encases a 1.4 GHz processor and a 4.3-inch AMOLED ClearBlack display. Every demo I have seen of the display shows off the Windows Phone screen in bright, vivid detail. The front 1MP camera brings video calling to Windows Phone, and the 8MP rear camera with Carl Zeiss optics (F2.2 aperture) may be the best on any smartphone.

The Lumia 900 will operate on the AT&T LTE network, which unfortunately may task the 1830 mAh battery. The 14.5GB of internal memory is not expandable due to the lack of a memory slot, but will likely be sufficient for most buyers with the included SkyDrive cloud storage. While the Lumia 900 doesn’t have the best hardware on a smartphone, it is the best phone running Windows Phone.

No word on when the Nokia Lumia 900 will be available from AT&T, nor pricing. This is definitely the Windows Phone to beat.