Can The Lumia Smartphones Re-Ignite Nokia?

As predicted, Nokia launched the Lumia 710 and Lumia 800 Windows Phones, but the question is not if they are good quality phones – but more if they can excite the smartphone crows currently swooning over the iPhone 4S and Samsung Galaxy Nexus.

The Lumia 800 comes packing a 3.7″ WVGA (800 x 480) AMOLED ClearBlack display, 1.4GHz CPU, 512MB Ram, an 8MP camera with a Carl Zeiss lens (f2.2 aperture), and 16GB storage. It is clearly aiming at the iPhone, with a stunning screen (albeit with a less than Retina Display pixel density), and a great camera – but is it enough to pull the company out of the decline they’ve seen over the last couple of years? The software has been receiving rave reviews across the board as Microsoft is doing something actually different to its compeitors in the mobile OS space with its “live tiles”, and there is money for a huge marketing push – but we’ll have to wait and see how consumers vote with their wallets.

The Lumia 710 is a smartphone for the more budget conscious, and offers a 3.7″ WVGA (800 x 480) TFT capacitive touch ClearBlack display, a 1.4GHz CPU, 512MB RAM, a 5MP camera, and 8GB storage. The all important question with the 710, then, is price – and it is on going to cost £235 without contract – so taht’s competing with the HTC Mozart 7 (WP7) and Wildfire S (Android), Samsung Galaxy Ace (Android), the BlackBerry Curve 9360, and even the iPhone 3GS. Tough competition.

Both new smartphones also come with a free 25GB of Windows SkyDrive cloud storage – but that is available to everyone, so nothing special for the Lumia 800, although integration is tight. How it compares with the free Box.net storage recently offered to all iOS users, or the DropBox storage upgrade offered to HTC user’s we’ll have to see.

Interested in the latest mobile phones? Why not check out our Buyers’ Guide to 2012 Smartphones >>