The Nokia Lumia 900 represents a number of firsts: it is the first high-end Windows Phone from Nokia to arrive in the U.Due south., it is the get-go 4G LTE smartphone from Nokia, and it is one of the first 4G LTE Windows Phones on the market.

Like the Lumia 800 that preceded it, the Lumia 900 features stunning industrial blueprint, not bad build quality, and a fantastic ClearBlack AMOLED display. Add together in great network performance, solid bombardment life, and a fast and fluid user interface thank you to Windows Phone 7.5, and you lot start to encounter that Nokia really might have a winner on their hands.

Unfortunately, it's not all peaches and roses with the Lumia 900, as its seemingly capable camera does non alive up to expectations in real world performance. Additionally, the Windows Phone Market place all the same doesn't offering about every bit many apps as its iOS and Android counterparts, though it has grown tremendously in recent months.

Despite its few shortcomings, I found the Lumia 900 to be an excellent smartphone, and I had a hard time putting it downwardly during my review flow. Read on to see if the Lumia 900 is the hero device that Windows Phone has needed from the outset to exist a successful smartphone platform and whether it will represent Nokia's return to form in the U.S. marketplace.

Hardware

The Nokia Lumia 900's pattern borrows heavily from the Lumia 800 and Nokia N9 that preceded information technology, as it features a single piece, polycarbonate body. The Lumia 900's color, whether that exist on the matte cyan or blackness models, or the glossy white version, is office of the polycarbonate material used to make the telephone, so it cannot exist scratched off similar painted finishes. The Lumia's design itself is stunning every bit it's removed any elements that could break upward its smoothen curves all around. In your mitt, the curved sides mask its eleven.4mm thickness, and though it tips the scales at 159g, information technology doesn't experience uncomfortably heavy.

The centerpiece of the Lumia 900 is its new 4.iii-inch screen. It sports a ClearBlack AMOLED display that features tremendous viewing angles, inky deep blacks, and punchy colors. Nokia'due south ClearBlack polarization technology eliminates a lot of the glare we encounter on many smartphone displays, and it allows the Lumia 900 to be perfectly usable outdoors in direct sunlight. Unlike the AMOLED screens on other popular smartphones, the Lumia'south does not unnaturally over-saturate colors, and then images and video are more accurately portrayed.

The WVGA, 480 x 800 pixel screen could certainly benefit from a denser resolution, specially when it is compared to the 720p and Retina Display screens offered past the competition. Merely, aside the from the relatively low resolution, at that place is piffling to mutter about with the 900'due south display, though its large size could make one-handed use of the telephone difficult for some.

The right-mitt side of the phone is home to the only physical buttons on the Lumia 900. Information technology has shiny metal buttons for volume, power/sleep/unlock, and camera shutter that experience very solid. On top is the micro-USB charging port, a three.5mm headphone jack, and a SIM card tray, while the bottom houses the external speaker.

On the front of the phone, beneath the display, are capacitive buttons for the standard Windows Telephone back, Start, and search functions. Above the screen is the new ane megapixel, broad-angle front-facing camera.

The back of the 900 features a smoothen end, with the housing for the viii megapixel camera and its LED flash the only things nowadays to break upwardly the phone's continuous lines. Since there are no seams or doors (aside from the micro-SIM card access tray), that ways at that place is no manner to access the 1830mAh bombardment or increase the phone's 16GB internal storage with a microSD card.