Sound & camera

Sound quality & Nokia Music

Nokia Music

I was a little disappointed with the Lumia 800 sound features. Not meaning that the sound quality was bad, but rather the absence of a sound equalizer. This means you can't adjust the levels yourself. Soon after I received the phone and I plugged it to my computer, Zune showed me that there's a software update for the phone. The update included backlight for the touch keys, and a slight raise in bass levels.

This raise wasn't anything big, as you can imagine. There are people who prefer flat EQ over deep bass. I'm one of those who like bass, and a sound equalizer in a music player is vital to have.

The sound quality indeed is great. The sound comes out clear and there's not much interference. This of course depends on the headphones you're using. However, in the Nokia Music player you can hear a clicking sound whenever the song changes. This is not much of a problem when you're listening with headphones or using the phone's own speaker, but if you're using external computer speakers or a portable mini speaker, the snapping sound is much, much louder. This snapping sound isn't present in other music players, like Spotify for example.

The player has nice abstract backgrounds to make the player look nicer than just the regular black with the album art. The home view of the player has five selections, my music, mix radio, store, gigs, settings.


The five screens of Nokia Music

The player needs your location to display gigs near you, so if you're an enthusiastic gig visitor, this could be a neat feature for you.

Mix radio plays music in different genres and you can skip only 6 songs per hour. The player shows you a picture of the artist as the background of the player and in the bottom you have selections to download the song for offline, pause and skip. The skip button will gray out if you've skipped the allowed 6 songs per hour.

The player includes Nokia music store, where you can log in with your Nokia account details. Buying music is simple, if you have your credit card details already added to the service, just click pay and the album you selected will start downloading. I once had Nokia's Comes With Music service active, and I downloaded loads of music from the Nokia music store, but I don't seem to be able to download the songs from the store to the phone for free now. There's also no section to view your already purchased songs, but they have probably thought of making the application as simple as possible. Though to me the structure is very inconsistent in some parts of the player, as I already pointed out in the previous chapter.

UPDATE: (almost forgot to mention)
When you're listening to music or watching videos using the phone's own speaker and turn the volume to the very top, the same volume level is used when you're listening with headphones. In Android it remembers your last volume levels for both non-earphone and earphone usage, so you'll be safe from terrible ear breaking volumes. This is a major shortcoming compared to Android, and I bet many people will get their daily dose of maximum volume treatment when they don't remember they've turned the volume to the very maximum.

Separating the volume levels between headphone use and speaker use is very important, and I hope this feature is added as soon as possible.

Speaker

The built-in speaker is not very loud. It also lacks in dynamic range, which would make the sound pop up, but that might be just because it's not meant for playing music. At the highest volume levels the sound is a little hollow, but nothing too terrible. Now that Nokia is moving towards WP7 with Microsoft, I wonder if they'll continue making XpressMusic phones. The Nokia 5800 XM had an awesome speaker sound quality with a stunning bass for mobile phone speakers.

In-box headphones

I was quite impressed with the provided headphones, as usual for Nokia. The ones I got with the S II were really awful to use, the sound was muffled and sounded as if there was something preventing the sound from coming out. The headphones provided with the Lumia 800 are not in-ear canal headphones, but of the regular design that is slowly disappearing from the headphone market.


The headphones look quite good

Headphones of this type don't feel very comfortable in your ear, and especially when you don't get rubber buds to put over the hard plastic, the headphones don't feel very good if you don't have big ears.


Camera

The camera has quite good specs. For anyone who understands a little more about cameras and lenses, the aperture is f/2.2 and the focal length is 28mm equivalent. Minimum focusing range is 10 cm, so you'll get pretty awesome macro shots. The sensor boasts the almost standard 8 megapixels. As a plus to the whole, the camera has Carl Zeiss Tessar lens, which Nokia has used always as their high-end phones' optics and is known to be very good.

Here I have some samples I took with the camera. (Beware of large images, opens in a new tab)



The pictures are sharp and colorful

The photos have a lot of detail, but noise comes in very easily. Even though the lens aperture is as big as 2.2, the camera seems to use large ISO to help lighting up the photos. Still, thanks to the big aperture size, the camera produces nice bokeh effect to the background and provides nice looking depth to the photos. This is most visible in macro shots.

In low light the colors looked really washed out. I took two samples. The first one with flash disabled and the second one with automatic flash, but the flash didn't fire. The colors were a lot better in the second one, but still not as good as in the photo the S II took.

Here are the samples for both the S II and Lumia.


Left to right: Lumia, Lumia, S II

You have quite nice camera settings. You can adjust white balance, exposure values, ISO, metering mode, effects, contrast, saturation, focus mode, resolution and flickering reduction. By adjusting these values you can control the color richness of the photos.

I had some problems with the camera on this particular model. Some photos looked like as if there was a plastic cover on the lens and the light bursted whenever there was a brighter light. I think after wiping the lens more thoroughly the light wouldn't burst like that any more.

As a whole the camera performs really well, but I still feel that the camera isn't as good as the camera should be when the phone is sent to retail. The phone was used when I got it for testing, so I can't compare it to a new one.


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NIKO April 9 2012
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