Nokia's Lumia not lighting the world on fire

London: Nokia faces a huge challenge in 2012: to halt its decline in the smartphone market that it once dominated. Will its Microsoft Windows Phone-powered Lumia help make up lost ground? In Europe, the response to the Lumia has been pretty lukewarm. Reviews were also generally poor, with one reviewer in The Guardian going so far as to offer his Lumia for sale after only a month of use. Reviews don’t matter if customers buy the handset and in this respect we have mixed messages. A survey by French bank BNP Paribas released in December showed only 2 percent of European mobile phone owners wanted to buy the Lumia 800. However, British carriers were saying that the Lumia was one of the best Nokia launches in recent memory and topping their best seller lists. [caption id=“attachment_171443” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“The new Nokia smart phone Lumia. Reuters “]  [/caption]Unlocked Nokia 800 handsets are already selling at a discount on Amazon, which isn’t a good sign for such a new handset. So much for Europe’s response to the Lumia, but what about India, which has some of the most loyal Nokia fans anywhere. Ankit Tuteja of IBNLive has this not-so-ringing endorsement: Nokia Lumia 800 a challenger, but not a killer. Tuteja found the interface to be appealing but possibly a bit boring after a while. In the end:

“Nokia has shown a flicker of competitiveness and it is also the best Windows Phone device in the market now. But it is also equally true that it is not the best smartphone around. The phone and the OS are both good, but it isn’t a killer.”

Kushan Mitra at Business today found the Lumia to be a “pleasantly surprising device”. However, he asked:

“Is it worth the Rs 30,000? Now, honestly, I would buy a slightly cheaper Android device, but it would depend on my budget.”

He’s waiting for the “plasticky Lumia 700”, which will sell for Rs 10,000 cheaper. Hands on with the Lumia Personally, I finally got my hands on a Nokia Lumia 800 over the holiday break. A friend had bought one and she raved about it. She runs her own Microsoft Exchange server and the phone is tightly integrated into it. It also has nice integration with social networks directly on the home screen, and the Microsoft’s tiled Metro interface has a lot of nice touches. The phone does look very smart, but then, so did Nokia’s very rare N9, which looks very similar. It’s slim, and the AMOLED display is astounding, with cool, rich colours. However, I do wonder how Nokia fans will respond to Microsoft’s mobile OS. This is not Symbian, the operating system they know and often love. Apart from a few Nokia apps, this is a Microsoft phone with a Nokia logo. All that time you’ve spent learning your way around your Nokia won’t translate to the Lumia. I’m still holding on to my Nokia N82, an almost four-year-old smartphone because it still has one of the best cameras of any mobile phone that I’ve ever used and, sadly, it still seems to have been the high water mark for Nokia’s cameras. Nokia’s old camera app was one of the best available with a range of adjustments that rivalled stand-alone point-and-shoot cameras. My N82 also works pretty well on the automatic settings, but when I need something more, I can easily change the settings from a convenient side menu. I didn’t put the Lumia through all of its paces but, like most other reviewers, I found that the Lumia’s camera seems to continue the slide from the N82’s peak, and it definitely doesn’t compare well with the iPhone 4S or Samsung’s Galaxy S2. In pretty normal light, the focus wasn’t all that clear, and the colours seemed a bit washed out. For the Lumia in India, the real question has to be whether it can compete on the high end with the iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy S2, and whether it can compete on the low-end with the flood of low-priced Android smartphones and even Nokia’s Asha range of entry-level smartphones. The fact that this question still hangs over Nokia in 2012 does not bode well for its turnaround.