The Nokia Lumia 800′s going to have to shuffle over a bit, as there’s a new Windows Phone king in town – theNokia Lumia 900. It looks like an expanded version of the Lumia 800, but is it really that simple? We take a closer look at the phone’s tech specs to find out.

The answer to that opening question is: no, it isn’t that simple. The Nokia Lumia 900 is the new Nokia flagship, and it wrestles that title from the Nokia Lumia 800 with good reason. Here’s the full lowdown.

4.3-inch AMOLED ClearBlack Display

The most obvious change from the Nokia Lumia 800 to the Nokia Lumia 900 is the screen size. Rather than a 3.7-inch AMOLED display, we now have a 4.3-inch AMOLED display – that’s more than half an inch bigger. While the resolution stays the same (800 x 480), tests have shown that the Nokia Lumia 900 uses an improved RGB screen matrix, making for an even crisper picture.

Cameras: 8-megapixel main, 1-megapixel front

The Nokia Lumia 900 has pretty much the same 8-megapixel camera on its back as that found in the Nokia Lumia 800, but flip it over and you’ll see the next major improvement. It’s the first Nokia Lumia device to come with a front-facing camera – a decent 1-megapixel unit, as it turns out. This will come in handy with the new Skype app that’s just hit beta, allowing for video calls. It’ll also work in a similar way with the current Tango app.

Bigger battery

The final improvement for the Nokia Lumia 900 is its bigger 1830mAh battery. To put that into context, the Nokia Lumia 800 comes with a 1450mAh battery. Why so large? Sure, that 4.3-inch screen will chew up a little more power, but not enough to warrant such a mighty step up in battery size.

The truth is that the Nokia Lumia 900 was developed initially for the US market, and so was built to support the country’s power-hungry LTE – or 4G – networks. As we don’t have such networks in this country yet, the result should be very simply a device with an extra-mighty battery life. Excellent!

1.4GHz CPU, 512MB RAM

The rest of the Nokia Lumia 900′s specs will be familiar to any Nokia Lumia 800 and Nokia Lumia 710 owners. It runs on the same potent double-act of a 1.4GHz processor and 512MB of RAM. This will ensure that applications, multitasking, web browsing and the like will run like greased lightning.

Windows Phone 7.5

Yep, it’s the same story with the Nokia Lumia 900′s operating system. We’re talking Windows Phone 7.5 with the extra spice that Nokia has brought in the shape of Nokia Maps, Nokia Music and – of course – Nokia Drive. In fact, that latter app should be a perfect fit for the larger screen of the Lumia 900.

Dimensions

What’s surprising about the Nokia Lumia 900 is that it’s not quite as big as you might be expecting (127.8mm x 68.5mm x 11.5mm). Oh, it’s bigger than the Nokia Lumia 800 alright, thanks to that 4.3-inch screen, but it’s not proportionally bigger. That’s because the surrounding bezel is proportionately smaller – the screen fills the front of the device better, in other words.

As for weight, that extra-large battery means an extra 18 grams – 160 grams, to be precise. Not feather-light, exactly, but certainly manageable.

Culled from NokNok

It can be a little hard to change to a new mobile platform. We all live with our phones every day for up to a couple of years, and in that time we get to know all the shortcuts and quirks.

For those pondering over to make the switch from Symbian to Nokia Windows Phone, Don’t let familiarity with Symbian put you off Windows Phone, though, as it really is very easy to pick up. Here’s how it behaves in the core areas of usage.

Interface

While Symbian and Nokia Belle have a fairly traditional spread of homescreens (Belle has six), each populated by app icons and widgets, Windows Phone is far simpler. It has one main home screen, supported by a secondary screen populated by all of your applications.

Windows Phone’s main screen is populated by Live Tiles rather than static app icons. These are basically big square widgets – which means that as well as taking you through to the app they actively show you relevant information from within the app. For example, the Pictures tile will scroll through the pictures you’ve snapped on your Lumia phone’s camera, and the Calendar tile will show you your next appointment. All glanceable information that cuts out needless swiping and tapping, and strengthens your attachment to your phone.

This strong and uniquely styled interface – called Metro UI – is carried through each of Windows Phone’s native apps. Rather than flicking between screens, you appear to scroll left and right across a very wide page – an effect that not only looks great, but serves to tell you where you are in the app.

Messaging

Email and SMS each get their own Live Tile on the main screen on Windows Phone. In fact, if you add a subsequent email account that will automatically get its own Live Tile too. Each Live Tile will show how many unread messages you have waiting.

As text messages come in, a small notification bar will appear at the top of your phone’s screen. This tells you who the message is from, and offers the first line of text. It also acts as a shortcut button to the message within the text message app, but it doesn’t pull down into a full menu like the more recent versions of Symbian.

The actual process of text entry in Windows Phone is quite similar to that found in Symbian. The virtual keyboard is easy to use, and as you type out words you’ll be provided with suggestions as to which word you mean – which can be tapped to select.

Contacts

The Contacts facility in Windows Phone is actually called People. It provides one of our favourite Live Tiles – a constantly changing mosaic of the pictures you have attached to your contacts. These are pulled through automatically as you link in your accounts from Gmail, Facebook and the like.

But the main function of people is, of course, to find and make calls quickly. This hasn’t been forgotten – in fact it’s one of the quickest systems we’ve ever used. By hitting the first header in the contacts list (likely either ‘#’ or ‘a’) you’ll bring up a grid of all the letters that you have contacts under. Touching one of these will take you to that letter’s contacts. Easy!

As well as the basics, People also contains a ‘What’s new’ section that pulls in all the latest Tweets, Facebook updates and LinkedIn posts from your contacts.

Web browsing

Windows Phone uses an optimised version of Internet Explorer 9, so as you’d expect it’s very quick and very easy to use. There’s a single bar at the bottom which contains a combined email address/Bing search field, and the bar can also be expanded to show more options (including favourites and settings). Browsing itself is slick and responsive, with pinch to zoom.

But the real advance made in Windows Phone when it comes to web browsing is integrated search. While there might be a search widget installed on your homescreen in Nokia Belle, your Nokia Lumia phone comes with a dedicated search button. Hit this at any time to initiate a Bing search, which can be made using text, voice or even an image (utilising the phone’s camera). It’ll also search the web for entries relevant to your locality.

Apps

Some people feel that apps define any modern smartphone platform, and both Symbian and Windows Phone are well catered for in this regard. As you’d expect, with the Nokia Store (formerly Ovi) having launched a good two years prior to Windows Phone 7.5, it has the greater number of apps, but Windows Phone Marketplace excels in both quality and the sheer rate of growth.

What sets the Marketplace apart is the way in which even third party applications are optimised for the operating system. Major players like eBay, Flickr, Facebook and IMDb have all adopted the Metro UI for their apps – and the results are stunning. It means there’s a base level of uniformity to the Windows Phone user experience, making navigation a doddle throughout.

Culled from NokNok