LONDON—Don't expect the unexpected here. Nokia's two new Windows Phones are elegant, to be sure, but they're not huge departures from Microsoft's universally mandated Windows Phone experience. They also may not be coming to the United States.
Of the two, the new flagship Nokia Lumia 800 is surely the more striking. As expected, it uses the colorful polycarbonate body of the Nokia N9. In black, it's handsome. In blue or magenta, it really jumps out at you, and doesn't look like the other phones you're likely to see at your local cell phone store. Nokia makes the color wrap around the edge of the phone, so it comes at you from all directions. It's lovely.
The Lumia 800 has a 1.4-Ghz processor and a 3.7-inch, 800-by-480 AMOLED "ClearBlack" display; that's the same beautiful screen as on the N9, but a faster processor. Images look sharp and colors look very rich. The phone zipped through Windows Phone apps, which are generally pretty processor-efficient anyway. Bouncing from the People hub to Nokia's weird electronic music selection in Zune, I didn't see any slowdowns, and the Live Tiles flipped swiftly.
The software experience is the same on the cheaper Nokia Lumia 710, but the hardware isn't nearly as luscious. The Lumia 800 feels like it's made of some space-age material; the Lumia 710 feels like plastic. Where the 800's Windows action buttons are touch buttons, the 710's are a physical bar divided into three segments. The 710's body and screen also seemed to attract finger grease more easily than the 800. On the other hand, it comes in white, which the 800 doesn't. And the 710 has removable covers, which will come in black, white, blue, fuschia, and yellow.
The 710 has the same 1.4-Ghz processor as the 800, so applications zoomed along just as well. Nokia's demo phones had the new Nokia Drive navigation app loaded, but not the new Nokia Music or ESPN apps. Nokia Drive has beautiful 3D maps, but I couldn't test the directions feature as the phones weren't connected to the Internet.
The Nokia 800 and 710 are a start. They're a good start. I'm having trouble being excited about them because Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said no Nokia Windows Phones are coming to the U.S. until next year, and Nokia U.S. president Chris Weber hinted that our phones may not be these ones.
But if our phones have the design elegance and standout look of the Nokia 800, the company really has a chance. HTC has trumped Nokia's play for an elegant, low-cost white Windows Phone with the Radar, whose metal body feels classier than the 710.
The higher-end Windows Phones in the U.S. are generally gray or black slabs, though, leaving something like the 800 (especially with its free navigation app) a real opening. When the Samsung Focus S, likely the most successful of the next round of Windows Phones, hits the U.S., shoppers are going to have trouble telling the difference between it and a range of similar black-slab Android phones. The Nokia 800—or whatever succeeds it—won't have that challenge.