Camera
The Lumia 800's Carl Zeiss Tessar-branded camera disappointed us when we reviewed the phone last year -- we described it as "much fussier about having the right conditions than the snappers in the Galaxy S2 and especially the iPhone 4S".
I'm sad to say the Lumia 900's 8-megapixel snapper carries on this legacy of disappointment. This is a real shame when you consider that elsewhere in Nokia's Symbian-based mobile portfolio, Finland's finest is kicking up a storm of cameraphone innovation.
The level of detail in Lumia 900 snaps is generally soft rather than crisp. The phone also has a tendency to produce lens flare, and has lots of trouble dealing with variable light and shade across one scene.
A close-up shot of these objects indoors has a hazy look, lacking crisp detail (click image to enlarge).
The lens is especially fussy in lower light conditions. Shooting outdoors in daylight on an overcast day produced shots speckled with noise, lacking both detail and clarity. Shots taken indoors in a well-lit office environment were also typically grainy.
In London's sunshine-starved environs, I found colours were either murky or slightly over-saturated.
Even in daylight, the Lumia's lens produced shots that are noisy (click image to enlarge).
The 900 was especially finicky about snapping close-ups. You have to first switch on the macro mode in the settings, but even with this on, the phone wouldn't always lock on to the subject.
While the Lumia 900 will certainly serve for throwaway snaps of your mates, it fails to outshine the very high-quality snappers of its high-end rivals -- such as the HTC One X, the Sony Xperia S and the iPhone 4S.Samsung's Galaxy S2 also has a stonking camera so I have high hopes the S3 will knock our photographic socks off.
For video, the 900 produces reasonably good 720p-resolution footage although it's slow to correct the exposure as you travel from light to shade, or vice versa. The level of detail in the frame drops off, the more movement there is. Audio quality was pretty good, however.
One app that has now (finally) made it onto Windows Phone is Skype, so you can take advantage of the Lumia's front-facing camera to make video calls.
The Lumia 900's 8-megapixel snapper is not short on branding but it is short on crisp photographic detail.
Connectivity
The version of the Lumia 900 that launched in the US includes a super-speedy 4G network chip. Sadly, here in the UK, we're still stuck on 3G so Nokia hasn't bothered with the 4G chip in our version of the phone. Instead, it's added DC-HSPA technology that can support faster 3G speeds -- potentially up to twice as fast as our current top-line 3G speeds -- provided your mobile operator has upgraded its network to support DC-HSPA.
Vodafone has added a version of DC-HSPA to some of its network -- in central London and other UK cities -- which supports speeds of up to 28.8Mbps. Other UK operators haven't yet upgraded. Three told me it is expecting to roll DC-HSPA out nationwide this summer, while Everything Everywhere -- which owns Orange and T-Mobile -- said it will add it in the last quarter of this year.
So, when buying the 900, you certainly shouldn't bank on getting faster mobile data right out of the box. Network speeds are unreliable at the best of times, with multiple factors affecting the rates achieved. In a speed test of the UK version of Apple's new iPad (which also has DC-HSPA), for instance, conducted in central London using Vodafone's network, it achieved a very sluggish 0.64Mbps -- a far cry from the mooted maximum.
Conclusion
The UK's Lumia 900 has limited appeal. It has less to offer than its US twin, since we don't yet have 4G networks, and its hardware isn't that different from its cheaper, sleeker sibling, the Lumia 800. It's also not a given that any of these Windows Phones will be upgradeable to Windows Phone 8 -- a caveat emptor for this the most expensive of Nokia's Lumias.
If you're not hook, line and sinker in love with Windows Phone, there's no reason to commit to the Lumia 900 -- not when the same amount of money (or even less cash) can bag you a much more capable Android or iOS device.