I've had my Lumia for about 3 weeks and am now getting fairly used to it having moved from a Nokia X6. I bought the phone SIM-free for £400 from Phones for U and got a replacement mini SIM for free from O2 so that I could continue with my existing contract with them. They made the transition hassle free. I bought a Nokia branded leather case from Carphone Warehouse for £20 and a DC-6 (?) car charger for £4 from Amazon. I'm delighted with these accessories.
The Lumia 800 is to my mind a beautiful phone and lives up to the physical form standards I have come to expect from Nokia. It sits in the hand easily and the function controls come easily to hand. The body is smooth and the touch screen absolutely superb. I am a light user - I turn the WiFi on as and when I need it but leave the Bluetooth on pretty much permanently since I make a lot of hands free calls in my Fiesta Titanium. I have no data allowance so have to buy data as I use it at a fairly high price. For this reason the data is turned off pretty much permanently.
The battery issue mentioned so often hasn't been an issue for me. I charged the phone 1 hour ago and it currently predicts 2 days and 5 hours of battery life left. Last evening I surfed the web for 2 hours using WiFi here in Germany (I'm on holiday!) and the battery still had 47% of it's charge left.
I really do hope that those of you who are currently suffering with battery life find improvements when the new software update is released in January so that your frustration abates and you can start to enjoy your investment.
I have compared the battery life of my son-in-laws iPhone here in Germany and I'd say my Lumia is knocking spots off it.
I'm not at all sure which parts of the software and features come from Nokia and which come with the Windows OS. In general I find the phone easy to use now I'm used to it - but it's taken a while and some effort and patience on my part. I'd say that it's now easier to find my way around the features than my X6 with some notable exceptions.
1. The Drive function is an ENORMOUS step backwards and I'm hoping it will be updated in the very near future. The X6 navigation system was truly free to the end user. I downloaded maps before driving across Europe and had no further costs. I could set up favourite routes well in advance of the journey with route points to suit my needs. The system was totally reliable and relatively easy to use. I've downloaded the European maps I need to the Lumia but frankly am hesitant to use them because of the need to keep a data link to the network. Here in Europe I have to pay for roaming data at £3 per MB. My first question - how much data traffic is needed to use Drive if maps have already been downloaded to the Lumia?
2. The X6 keeps a log of calls and data usage. Where do I find a log of calls, texts and data usage on the Alumina?
3. When I used the media player or radio on the X6 I could exit the application when I'd finished using it. How do I exit the radio and media player on my Lumia? With the radio I have been using pause then the 'back' button. If I don't use pause but use the back button the radio keeps playing so if I DO use the pause followed by the back button has the radio shut down or is it running in the background? Ditto all of that for the media player!
Thank you for reading all of this. I think that Nokia are on to a winner with the Lumia if they can get what I hope are the obvious teething troubles sorted.
If anyone out there can answer my questions I'd be very appreciative!
Colin
