Canada isn’t currently slated to get the LTE-powered Nokia Lumia 900 — at least not yet — but that doesn’t mean we can’t lust after it. TELUS will be releasing the Lumia 800 soon, and Rogers the 710 in early February, but what I really want is the 4.3-inch goodness of those devices’ bigger brother.
I had a chance to play with the Lumia 900 briefly, and it’s a doozy. Certainly bigger than the 800, its weight is evenly distributed and the body is slightly thinner. The curved “2.5D” glass of the Lumia 800 is eschewed for a flatter smattering of Gorilla Glass, but it’s no less attractive as a result. Besides the addition of an LTE chipset, the Lumia 900 comes with a 1MP front-facing camera. The rest of the specs are the same: 1.4Ghz Snapdragon MSM8255 processor, 512MB RAM, 16GB internal storage and an 8MP camera with Carl Zeiss lens. Happily, the 800×480 pixel ClearBlack AMOLED display is not Pentile like the 800, but more like the Super AMOLED Plus of the Samsung Galaxy S II.
Nokia has had an incredible reception here at CES. The Lumia 900 won tons of “Best of Show” awards, and the booth on the show floor has been constantly busy, with hundreds of new and old fans huddling around the various devices for some hands-on time. Windows Phone has been embraced in the last few weeks in ways I couldn’t have imagined six months ago: Nokia has not only brought more attention to the platform, but to other Windows Phone vendors like HTC and Samsung.
While the Marketplace is still fairly short on quality apps, an increasing number of dev houses are recognizing the importance of having Windows Phone apps and that bodes very well for Microsoft in 2012.
