This is the phone we've been waiting for?

I've long been a fan of Nokia, and so I was excited when the Finnish phone maker & Microsoft announced their strategic alliance in Winter 2011, an alliance that would supposedly lead to high-quality phone designs coupled with some secret Nokia sauce for Microsoft's innovative Windows Phone 7 OS.

Well now we see the fruits of that labor and it's left me a little disappointed. Introducing the Nokia Lumia 800:

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Windows Phone Mango doesn't require a lot of horsepower (unlike some mobile operating systems), so I'm not disappointed at the positively ancient single-core Snapdragon CPU. But other aspects of the hardware are wanting:

Only a 3.7" screen, barely larger than the iPhone 4s and smaller than just about every other Windows Phone on the market
Only 512mb of RAM - the N9, the beautiful but dead-phone-walking twin to the Lumia 800, has double the RAM
Lack of a front-facing camera - I thought this was a requirement for all new Windows Phones?
Only an 8megapixel shooter when Nokia was able to release a 12mp camera on the back of its N8 phone...over 1 year ago!
Only 16GB of memory. What is this, 2007?

So while the phone has a beautiful design, a moulded polycarbonate shell, and tough Gorilla Glass, it's still pretty meek when stacked against the competition.

And then there's the software side of things. As far as I can tell, the only special Nokia features are turn-by-turn navigation with their own map software, a streaming music player (I'd much rather have Pandora or Zune streaming, thanks), and some ESPN sports application.

Yawn.

I see very little that's compelling here, especially since there will be a Nokia price premium attached. I got an HTC Trophy - a year old phone - with similar specs - on contract with Verizon for $50. It's got a bigger screen, is built well, and will perform just as well as the Lumia 800 given its similar specs.

Also released today was the downmarket Lumio 710, a significantly chunky phone that also runs Windows 7. Neither phone will be released in the States until Q1 2012.

Suffice it to say, if you're a Windows Phone fan, these are not the phones we've been waiting for. Hardware-wise, they just aren't directly competitive with the top Android phones and the iPhone 4s.

Hands on review from the Verge:

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