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Pros
Windows Phone 8 OS is more refined than ever. Fast. Excellent camera. Great voice quality.
- Cons Heavy. Low-res screen. Few compelling apps. Uninspired design.
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Bottom Line
The Nokia Lumia 810 delivers a solid, affordable Windows Phone 8 experience, but its blocky design and low-res screen don't do it any favors.
The Windows Phone 8 Nokia Lumia 810 ($99.99 direct) on T-Mobile bucks the gargantuan phone trend with its relatively normal-size 4.3-inch display. But oddly, the phone itself is still too big, thanks to its uninspired design. The Lumia 810 has a smooth, fast OS and a powerful camera for a mid-price phone, but its unusual heft and relative paucity of compelling apps make it a tough sell, especially next to our top pick on T-Mobile, the Samsung Galaxy S III, or even the HTC One S.
Design, Screen, and Connectivity
Measuring 4.6 by 2.9 by 0.44 inches (HWD) and weighing 5.1 ounces, the Lumia 810 is basically a brick. There are virtually no distinguishing features style-wise, other than sharply cut lines and a slight taper to the soft touch back panel. The WP8 Nokia Lumia 920 over on AT&T may be huge, but at least it has some distinctive design touches. While the Lumia 810 is smaller than the boat-like Lumia 920, plenty of phones with 4.3-inch screens like the Lumia 810 are smaller still, as well as more distinctiveâ"the HTC One S and the Motorola Droid Razr M on Verizon are just two examples.
The right panel features a volume rocker switch, a power button, and a camera shortcut button near the bottom. The back panel is clear save for the Nokia logo, Carl Zeiss lens, and an LED flash. The bottom edge holds a micro USB charger port and a pair of stereo speakers, while the top edge houses a standard-size 3.5mm headphone jack.
Unlike with the Lumia 920, you can pull the back panel off of the 820 and switch it for versions in different colors. Nokia offers red, yellow, gray, black, white, purple, and cyan. Some of them support the company's new wireless charging setup with the appropriate aftermarket pad, although Nokia's own version isn't available yet.
The 4.3-inch OLED capacitive touch screen offers brilliant color and deep blacks. It's also very bright. But with just 800-by-480-pixel resolution, it's at a disadvantage against 720p and even 960-by-540-pixel devices. Windows Phone 8 system fonts still look okay, but you notice it with the lack of browsing real estate and when reading.
Typing on the on-screen keyboard is easy in both portrait and landscape mode. The predictive text engine is good, if not the best I've seen; it fixes typos where it can, but doesn't seem to intuit that a properly spelled word could still be a mistake in context (i.e. fox instead of fix).
The Lumia 810 is a quad-band EDGE (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) and dual-band HSPA+ 42 (1700/2100 MHz) device with 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and NFC. I had no problem connecting to our 5GHz WPA2-encrypted corporate network. Here in Manhattan, I saw excellent data speeds around 14-15Mbps down, although uploads stayed in the 1-1.5Mbps range. Check our Fastest Mobile Networks story for much more on data speeds in 30 U.S. cities. You can also use the Lumia 810 as a mobile hotspot with the appropriate data plan, which is helpfully named "Smartphone Mobile Hotspot" on T-Mobile.
Voice Quality, OS, and Apps
Voice quality was excellent, with a warm, round tone in the earpiece, and full, clear transmissions through the microphone that sound almost landline-quality. Reception and external noise-rejection are also solid. Calls sounded fine through a Motorola CommandOne  Bluetooth headset, and voice dialing worked well over Bluetooth. The speakerphone gets very loud; in my tests, it sounded thin and brittle but you can definitely use it outside. We're still testing battery life and will update this review as soon as we have a result.
Under the hood is a 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 dual-core Krait processor and 1GB RAM. With this kind of horsepower and fewer pixels to push than on the Lumia 920, the Lumia 810 feels like a rocket most of the time. Our benchmark tests confirmed these impressions, although Internet Explorer still isn't as fast on BrowserMark as Android and iOS devices are with the same processor.
Windows Phone 8 makes its first appearance on T-Mobile with the Lumia 810. It's a nice OSâ"it already was in version 7.5, except that now it can take advantage of better hardware, like the dual-core processor and 1080p camcorder (more on that below). The updated home screen comes with live tiles in different sizes, letting you see at a glance things like new messages and calendar appointments without having to tap on anything. You can even set the lock screen to show some of this.
(Next Page: Apps, Multimedia, and Conclusions)
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