The Nokia Lumia 900 is the top of the Finns' range of Windows Phone handsets with a huge screen and 8-megapixel camera -- but can it offer enough to beat the best of Android?
At first glance, the Lumia 900 looks very similar to the slightly smaller Lumia 800, with similar colourful plastic shell. Come a little closer though and you'll notice the 4.3-inch screen, making it a much more substantial handful than the 800's 3.7-incher.
Behind its protective Gorilla Glass the AMOLED touchscreen offers 800x480-pixel resolution, which is perfectly respectable but it's not among the sharpest, scraping in behind the iPhone, HTC One S and Samsung Galaxy S3. Even the 800 is a little sharper, since it squeezes the same pixel count into its smaller screen. It's beautifully sensitive though, and Nokia's ClearBlack technology offers rich contrast with exceptionally deep, dark blacks offsetting the slightly oversaturated colours.
Considering the price and the 900's place at the top of the Windows Phone tree, it's disappointing that it only offer a single-core 1.4GHz processor, especially since its rivals are now routinely offering dual-core or even quad-core handsets. Still, it ain't slow, and the relative simplicity of the Windows OS certainly seems to be in its favour, since it whips through the apps with ease, even when you have a bunch of them open and running.
The latest Windows Phone 7.5 Mango is the operating system, which is beautiful to look at, and easy to find your way around, even if you're a Windows Phone newbie. Facebook and Twitter are incorporated into the OS, so once you've set up your accounts, Facebook pictures and the latest tweets will start appearing on the dynamic tiles on your homepage. Disappointingly though, as with other Mango handsets, the 900 won't be making the jump to Windows Phone 8 Apollo when it comes along later this year.
Nokia Music, with its selections of playlisted music that you can stream for free; Local Scout also GPS to help you find some even rather obscure local stuff and there's a full version of the Microsoft Office suite on board too.
The browser looks good, but still lacks Flash support, so you won't be able to play all the video that's available, and the YouTube app is still only a link to the website, which is a shame.
The 8-megapixel camera comes with a Carl Zeiss lens, as we expect from the higher quality Nokia handsets. It opens quickly with a long push on the shutter button on the side and offers a range of settings to play with. Probably too many settings actually, unless you know what you're after when you're playing around with contrast, saturation, exposure, ISO, metering and white balance.
Detail isn't quite as good as it should be and less than perfect light conditions were quick to throw up issues with noise. It will record video at 720p HD, which comes out pretty well even when played back on a much bigger screen. There's also a 1-megapixel camera on the front for self-portraits and video calls -- besides the larger screen, this is the main difference between the 900 and the 800.
As with other Windows Phone handsets, there's no opportunity to expand the memory via microSD card, so you're stuck with the 16GB of onboard memory plus the 25GB of free cloud storage that comes with Microsoft's SkyDrive service.
There's no option to replace the battery with a spare since it's sealed-in, iPhone-style, but it's a big 'un, and gave us a good one and a half days' worth of use.
It's bigger, but despite its really rather lovely screen, the Lumia 900 is really no more powerful than its little brother, the Lumia 800, which offers a similar spec for a more modest price.