Continuing with the Windows Phone theme… earlier this year Nokia announced their intention to embrace Microsoft’s new mobile OS. A few months ago, an internal Microsoft event previewed Nokia’s first phones and their ambitious marketing plans. Since then you may have seen a lot of advertising and events such as the Deadmau5 gig on the banks of the Thames with the Millbank tower’s eight hundred windows transformed into a huge screen.

In October Nokia announced two new Windows Phone offerings… the Lumia 710 and the Lumia 800. It was the Lumia 800 which grabbed everyone’s attention in the office, quite rightly as it was clearly the top-of-the-range option. Since the announcement, Microsoft colleagues have been making enquiries about how to get a Lumia 800. Cruelly, some internal events dangled the phones in front of our eyes, but with no hope of getting one other than being the lucky winner in a prize draw.

So I decided to call up a good mate in Nokia and try to shamelessly blag a Lumia 800… and it worked. I have thanked him profusely, I will show it to customers and contacts, and they will take note because this is a fine-looking device. The first thing that hits you is the display, but let’s come back to that.

Let’s start with the packaging. When I first bought an iPod (late 2004 I think) it was apparent that Apple had done everything to make the consumer live the Apple dream – even the box was cool, and had been designed by a designer, not someone who just makes boxes. Nokia have learnt the lesson. The packaging is well-designed and gives the impression that this is a high-end product. I removed everything from the box and I was able to put it all back in with factory precision.

The box contained the phone (it would have been a major disappointment if it hadn’t), a small number of documents (in their own sleeve which fitted the box construction), a USB cable with attachable plug, headphones, and a rubber case for the phone. The phone was the matt black edition, which would have been my first choice… blue would have been fine, but Pete Hampton was ready to wet his pants laughing had it been the pink edition. The phone’s outer shell is polycarbonate, and apparently won’t show scratches too badly because the colour goes all the way through the shell.

Build quality – although it’s pretty much the same weight and dimensions as my HTC Windows Phone it feels more solid and overall just better quality. I guess you can’t really appreciate it until you hold one and then the other. The phone features a little hatch in the top (revealing the micro USB port), volume and camera buttons on the right-hand side and a speaker on the bottom. The back is very simple, featuring Carl Zeiss optics for the 8 megapixel camera and a flash.

Okay, let’s talk about the screen – side-by-side with the HTC this is the biggest difference and is the phone’s eye-catcher. It’s a capacitive AMOLED display protected by Corning Gorilla Glass in a slightly raised curved design. The colours are incredibly vivid, the black is very black (again, winning the side-by-side comparison) and the images are very sharp. The touch-screen is extremely responsive and smooth. Nokia have done an extremely good job on it.

As you know, the Lumia 800 runs the Windows Phone OS… it ships with ‘Mango’ and a small update was available. So the operation of the phone was really no different to the HTC – even though it has a faster processor, the Windows Phone OS and it’s apps are so zippy that I’ve yet to have any issue over the phone’s performance. That’s more than can be said for my iPod touch, which should be renamed the iPod sloth after the iOS 5 upgrade. Yes, the more responsive touch-screen is a bonus. Nokia have a included a number of apps which won’t be found on other manufacturers’ phones – Maps, Music and Drive. Maps is like Google and Bing Maps, and Drive is sat-nav (looks very good, and although I have a Tom Tom it would be great value for someone who doesn’t). Music is (you’ve guessed it) the app for managing and playing music. Music has a very cool gigs feature, telling you where gigs are playing near you – Rihanna is playing at the O2 tonight, which is the most exciting thing happening within a 34 mile radius apparently. Personally I’d take ear plugs.

Sound quality is excellent, both on a call and when music is playing. To be honest I haven’t tried the camera yet – other reviews say that it’s fairly average. I firmly believe that if you want great photos you should use a proper camera – no-one has tried to shove a phone into an SLR camera, so why should anyone have great expectations of a camera shoved into a phone?

Every colleague who has spotted the Lumia 800 on my desk over the past couple of days has admired and envied it, and inevitably asked me how I got it and if I can get them one (no, I can’t). It has that effect – it’s impressive on the eye and the build quality is visible from afar and close-up. If this is Nokia’s first stab at a Windows Phone, I can only imagine the great things to come. Nokia made a bold leap in taking on the Windows Phone OS which is currently trailing the others in terms of market share. I always say to people who knock it “try it”. It’s a great OS, and on a Lumia 800 the experience is even better.

I think I mentioned Windows Phone recently, but as yet I haven’t mentioned Nokia’s first offerings for the platform. The Lumia 800 is one of two phones released so far (more are coming) and has been getting rave reviews. I have held one on two occasions, and twice considered making a run for it with the gorgeous device in my thieving paws. At the weekend I noted that some of the many mobile phone shops in Camberley had fully-working demo units on display (not those non-functional dummy units), so if you’re interested in seeing the Lumia 800 in the flesh there are opportunities to do so.

However, if you can’t be bothered to haul your back-side from the chair that it’s currently positioned on, here’s another option. Nokia have set up a Facebook page, The Amazing Demo, which allows you to experience the user interface and some of the functionality. The best of the demos is the people hub, and it does a good job of showing the different aspects of interacting with a contact via Facebook, e-mail, SMS and the phone (although it omits Twitter).

Please note that the performance of the simulator does not represent the performance of the Windows Phone platform itself.

The fact that IBM Lotus Notes Traveler (to give it it’s full name) is available on a wide variety of devices is old news. Traveler is now supported on the Apple iPhone, even though I don’t think that device will ever make a big impact on the market (ho ho). At Lotusphere we announced that Traveler will in the future be available for Android phones.

With the arrival of Domino 8.5 last year we provided Traveler support on Symbian-based devices… to the layman that means a fairly extensive range of Nokia phones. This was good news, particularly for someone like me who has made a number of trips to the Nordic region in the past nine months. For a couple of years I’ve been a BlackBerry user – in the UK that makes me one of the masses, but in Scandinavia and Finland that makes me the odd-man-out. Playing the hands-up game with a Nordic audience, I was one of three ‘Berry users at LCTY in Sweden (there were about two hundred attendees). In Finland I was in an exclusive club of one. There was a few iPhones, a couple of Androids, but the majority were Nokia owners.

So, it’s good that we now support Nokia phones. Firstly, I find that in many organisations a lot of people already have suitable Nokia devices, which lowers the cost of deploying Traveler – the organisation doesn’t have to acquire so many new mobile devices. Secondly, to date, Nokia have been closely allied with Microsoft – look at any photo of a Nokia E72 and you’ll see ‘Mail for Exchange’ on the home screen of the phone. We’re now working with Nokia to strengthen our relationship and get Traveler on more Nokia devices used within businesses.

A contact at Nokia was kind enough to give me a Nokia E72 phone, and yesterday I was connected to our Traveler deployment. The set-up was fairly easy once I’d worked out that the internal instructions I was given had different file names, and now the E72 is running with Lotus Mobile Connect, Traveler and (of course) Sametime. The E72 is a very good phone – a big clear crisp display, a extremely good keyboard, easy-to-use navigation, a five megapixel camera, the touch-sensitive track-pad that the latest BlackBerries have, and a built-in torch (yes, the camera’s flash can be switched on to create a torch effect – our American friends would call it a ‘flashlight’, but we all know they can’t even tell the difference between cookies and biscuits).

Click on the image above to see Lotus Traveler running on the E72… and note that we now have an image of this device which doesn’t show the E word.

I should give it its proper branded name… IBM Lotus Notes Traveler. There you go, that keeps the brand police happy. As you know, IBM Lotus are the software brand that gives you choice. You can use a BlackBerry, you can use Windows Mobile (with Traveler and with other solutions such as CommonTime, DME and Intellisync), you can use Symbian devices, and you can use an iPhone (with iNotes Ultralite).

IBM Lotus Domino 8.5 is very close to shipping, and one of the many new goodies is Traveler support for various Nokia devices running the Symbian operating system. A contact from a very well-known and valued Lotus customer (hi Richard) recently asked me “which devices does that cover?” – you can find the answer here, and the answer is “lots of devices”.

So why is this so important? Well, choice is important and at Lotus we like giving you choices. IBM Lotus Notes on Windows, Mac or Linux. Domino on a whole range of server platforms. It costs more to develop, but we think you’re worth it.

The other reason it’s important is that, if you look at that range of Nokia devices, people in many organisations will already have those devices in their hands. So the cost of enabling mobile e-mail and calendars may turn out to be lower than you think.

And the other other reason is market share. This surprised me when I saw it yesterday. According to Gartner (December 2008) Symbian devices accounted for 49.8% of smartphone devices shipped worldwide in the 3rd quarter of 2008. RIM (i.e. BlackBerry) were next with 15.9% followed by “Mac OS X” with 12.9%. Does that mean iPhone? Probably. Windows Mobile took 11.1% of the market, Linux devices took 7.2%, and the one-time giant of PDAs, Palm, took just 2.1%. So, Symbian was the clear market leader, and thus my title is vindicated.