India Gadget Reviews

The Nokia Lumia 900 is one of the most impressive releases from the Finnish phone Goliath in the last couple of years. It boasts some of the best hardware from Nokia to date along with the Windows Phone Mango OS. In this article I will take a closer look at the software and its interface.

The Windows Phone Mango (v7.5) OS is the latest version of Microsoft's smartphone platform and sees the implementation of its most advanced features so far. While this may be the case, the interface of the software remains surprisingly user friendly. The intuitive user interface starts with a simple unlock method which is carried out by simply sliding your finger from the bottom of the screen to the top. While the screen is locked, you will notice info for battery, Wi-Fi and mobile network strength displayed at the top of the screen, with larger icons at the bottom displaying the date and time.

When the screen is unlocked, you will instantly notice the 'tile' layout of the interface. This is essentially a combination of apps and live widgets which are displayed in larger icons than those we typically see in the grid setup of iOS and Android devices. This makes to the Nokia Lumia 900 easy to use, and of course makes it easy to find the apps you are looking for. Of course, the layout of the apps is completely customisable, so you can place your most commonly used apps and widgets within easy reach, so they can be instantly accessed after unlocking the screen.

Handsets which run iOS and Android (such as the iPhone 4S and Samsung Galaxy S2 respectively) require you to scroll sideways to access more apps and different homescreen setups, but the interface of the Nokia Lumia 900 instead scrolls downwards, much like the 'all apps' menu on an Android device. When you scroll sideways, you will be presented with an alphabetically sorted list of apps, which allows you to jump to an app based on the first letter in its title. This makes apps easy to find if you do not have it pinned onto your homescreen. To make the task of finding apps easier, you can also create folders whereby you can group apps by the category of your choice. For example you could have a folder for all your music apps, the apps you use at work, or all the apps for different messaging formats.

The selection of apps available from Windows' content library, Windows Marketplace, is a far cry from that of the AppStore and Google Play. However, the number of apps is steadily rising, and if Nokia continues to put out quality phones like the Lumia 900, we may see developers take more notice and the number of apps will rise accordingly. With around 80,000 apps though, you will find familiar titles like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc, along with popular games like Angry Birds. As a rule of thumb, if an app has been successful in iOS or Android format, it is likely to also be found on Windows Marketplace.

If you are looking for something different to the iOS or Android phones which are currently proving so popular, the Nokia Lumia 900 would be my top recommendation. The phone sports some impressive hardware, and the software is equally impressive, albeit less well known than iOS and Android.