Nokia Lumia 900 review

For the most part, Windows Phone 7 runs just as well on the Lumia 900 as it does on all Windows Phone handsets; transitions are smooth and quick, the onscreen keyboard is responsive and there are rarely any slowdowns. There was one area where we felt the Lumia 900 fell down: Nokia seems to have slowed down the scrolling, so you can’t flick up and down the menus with your finger as quickly as you can on the other phones in the Lumia range.

Everything else about Windows Phone is intact, so you have a capable web browser, Facebook integration, support for editing Office files and built-in cloud storage for your documents, an excellent email client and a calendar that, to our increasing annoyance, still doesn’t have a week view. You also have significantly less choice when it comes to apps, but things are improving; there are a couple of good travel apps, but you still miss out on big-name apps such as Rightmove, Sky+ and BBC iPlayer.

Mix Radio is part of the Nokia Music app and is a fantastic free music resource. Nokia Drive is a competent turn-by-turn navigation app with offline map support, but neither Nokia Maps nor Bing Maps support offline mapping. If you’re abroad you can use Nokia Drive at a pinch to navigate on foot without incurring data charges, but its car-oriented directions aren’t particularly useful for pedestrians.

The Lumia 900 is skinnier than the 710 and 610, but slightly fatter than the 800

Like the Lumia 800, the Lumia 900 has an 8-megapixel camera. It’s far better than the cheaper Lumia 710 and 610’s 5-megapixel cameras, but still fairly disappointing, especially compared to the models we’ve seen recently from HTC. As with the Lumia 800’s photos, the Lumia 900’s show significant noise, even in bright daylight. The Lumia 900’s camera also seems to have overly-saturated colours, leading to the blue sky in one of our test photos looking almost turquoise. Unlike the rest of the Lumia range, there’s also a front-facing camera. We found it worked fine in Skype video calls.

Nokia’s Lumia 900 is another good-looking and well made Windows Phone 7 handset. We don’t think it offers enough over the Lumia 800 to justify its £100 SIM-free and around £5-per-month on contract premium, though. If you’re after a Windows Phone 7 handset with a superb AMOLED screen and great build quality, the Lumia 800 is still the phone to get.