Hands-on with the Nokia Lumia 800 (Video)

There is something to be said for bravado, and when Stephen Elop said, during the Nokia 2011 Keynote address, “This is the first real Windows Phone,” we believed him.

In many ways, this is the culmination of what both Nokia and Microsoft set out to achieve: an enviable product, purposed to consolidate years of hardware and software experience into a gorgeous, functional and modern device. There is a palpable excitement here at Nokia World, a teeming swath of journalists, bloggers, industry and fans, all of whom were rightfully sceptical whether the company could pull off a comeback.

When you first hold the phone, seemingly melts into your hand, a soft matte curve polycarbonate body, hard-nosed and soft-tailed. Unlike most hardware of today, the Lumia 800 is hard at the edges and soft on the sides, fashioned from a single piece of bezeled plastic that maintains its colour through the body. This means that scratches won’t show up as severely, and body is more rigid than its competition. They’ve painstakingly looked at every way to increase quality and remove excess; even the speaker grill has been etched, rather than cut, to ensure chassis rigidity.

The front is taken up by a curved glass display with a 800×480 3.7″ ClearBlack OLED display. Like Samsung’s Super AMOLED displays, the LCD is fused to the glass, though Nokia chose to use a slightly convex covering, elevating the quality. It acts as a siphon in some ways; your eyes go through the clear cover to what’s underneath, and with its perfect contrast and superb (and I mean, absolutely stunningly beautiful) colour reproduction, it is one of the nicest displays I’ve ever seen.

The camera continues in the high-quality Nokia vein with its 8MP Carl Zeiss optics and low F/2.2 aperture. While I didn’t have a chance to see the results blown up, I saw clear colours, lots of detail and excellent shutter speeds. Like all Windows Phones, the camera app is simple and effective, allowing for instant photo review and sharing.

Along for the ride are two new services: Nokia Drive and Nokia Music. Drive is the first free turn-by-turn navigation software available for Windows Phones, and at this point it is a Nokia-exclusive. Powered by NAVTEQ, the maps use the same information as the Symbian version, but operation is noticeably smoother and more accurate. Maps can be downloaded for offline use, and there will be public transit maps for 71 countries. The full retinue of Bing Maps, now updated with Nokia’s NAVTEQ data, is of course available too,

Nokia Music is an extension of Windows Phone’s native music player, offering hundreds of free, curated Mixed Radio stations. Each station serves a rotating list of full-length songs in every genre. Users can choose 50 songs per station to cache for offline use, with 200 total over four stations at any time.

Arguably, this is the first really exciting Windows Phone. Microsoft has to be thrilled, since there is nothing better than a true flagship device. Nokia, too, needs to take the momentum of this launch and figure out how to turn it into sales. There are going to be millions of these devices floating around, from carriers to retailers to journalists, and the company is dedicated millions of marketing dollars to convince people to buy it. But there are still two elephants in the room: iOS and Android, each with a rabidly loyal fan base who, since its launch a year ago, have largely scoffed at Windows Phone. It’s attractive, they said; it’s smooth and intuitive, they claimed. But where are the apps? Where are the users?

If any one company can turn around the fortunes of an entire ecosystem, it’s Nokia. The Lumia 800 is a terrific, exciting and stunning piece of equipment. I actually said the word ‘Wow’ when I picked it up for the first time. But it won’t be released until early 2012 in Canada, presumably months after the launch of the Galaxy Nexus and a number of other products released in time for the winter rush. Nokia has a responsibility to keep the excitement level high, and though it helps, the device can’t do it all on its own.