Nokia Lumia 900 love from mainstream media. Reasons why Lumia 900 can sell well…

The tech blogs have had their turn and now we’re seeing news of the Nokia Lumia 900 trickle into mainstream American news who will reach more of the Nokia Lumia 900’s intended audience.

In this first video from CBS, they position it as Nokia and Microsoft teaming up (because apart from us geeks, a Nokia and Microsoft product is stil technically a new thing, even with the 710). The message is brief but it’s a very positive feedback.

“Tester’s say it’s a fast and powerful smartphone. It costs about $100 and will be in stores Sunday”

There’s a video here where Fox New’s tech expert, Haiwatha Bray, comes on to share info on the Lumia 900. He likes it and even goes as far as Smoking the presenter live on TV (even though he’s clearly taking his time to do their test). He praises that in certain actions, the Lumia 900 is faster.  Bray acknowledges WP isn’t going anywhere quick enough even though Bray thinks it’s absolutely outstanding with the Nokia Lumia 900 being a really good phone. They note a trend of people switching up their phones and without much thought, immediately going for an iPhone.

http://www.myfoxboston.com/dpp/morning/tech-lab-the-ultimate-phone-20120405

Bloomberg’s take with Rich Jaroslovsky. He says it measures up pretty well and turns out to be a very good phone and even better value. It has a number of features you might expect on more expensive phones. He says Nokia has a good number of apps like drive BUT you have to download them. He doesn’t like all the AT&T bloatware (all can be uninstalled, with AT&T, they took stuff like Drive off, though you can easily put it back on). Jaroslovsky says if he can get Nokia’s apps for free, why would he want AT&T’s? Apparently the Lumia isn’t as easy to use as the iPhone (no it’s easier! :p) It doesn’t have as many apps as iPhone or Android but found it more pleasurable than a number of more costlier phones he’s checked out recently. For $100, it’s a premium product for a value price. and well worth considering.

Bloomberg again.

Bloomberg host, Emily Chang brings up ‘software issues’ but Nicholas Thornton (a senior editor at New Yorker magazine and a Bloomberg contributing editor) shoots that down to the important point. People like it. Overall he thinks it will be a pretty good launch.  In his experience, it works pretty well.

I do like how they favour the much cheaper price of what is essentially a premium product. More so because in the UK, most can get away with paying nothing for a phone when the contract monthly price is high enough.

App problem creeps up. It’s not so much how many useful apps someone has, but the fraction available in comparison to iOS it seems. Nicholas says it’s a problem due to the small userbase. Symbian btw has the largest userbase. It was selling apps since about 2003. It introduced Ovi Store in 2009. Yet developers already complained about not wanting to develop for Symbian because of how difficult it was. By the time Qt could alleviate this, iOS was too far established.

CNN – nothing too much said there.

http://money.cnn.com/2012/04/05/technology/nokia-microsoft-lumia/

We posted this before, but Frobes thinks the Nokia Lumia 900 will sell.

Anthony Kosner cites the positive feedback from reviews, the great price, the nice feel, a great new OS and trusted brands. Some have expected Nokia needs to sell 1m in this quarter.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/04/04/five-reasons-the-nokia-lumia-900-windows-phone-will-sell/

I noticed in the comments someone mention that out of AT&T’s 9.4M sales in Q4 2011 holiday season, 7.6M were iPhone, leaving 1.8M to all the top end Androids, BlackBerry’s, WebOS – everything. (Wired confirms this) Now Lumia is expected to sell 1M. That’s more than 50% of all non iPhone sales, over 10% of all total sales. Some analysts say it might only be in the hundreds of thousands.

I can’t seem to find that link at the time of writing this.

Next up, Walt Mossberg. Fan of all Apple products, he previously dubbed the 710 as being good value for money.

However, he seems to be vastly irked by the fact that for some reason the web browser did not work on his Lumia 900, which he keeps pointing out, time and time again and is the reason not to recommend even at a low price, because apparently the browser did not work over WiFi.

I think he might have a broken device. He has said himself that the browser works on other Windows Phones he has tried so clearly it is not an OS issue. This is not even something brought up by ANY reviewer. It’s a shame Walt didn’t care to mention what the browser was like without WiFi (on AT&T’s network). Kevin C. Toefel from Gigaom was extremely pleased with mobile browsing speeds – even when not on LTE.

Walt does say it’s the best Windows Phone he has tested so it’s a shame something as fundamental as the browser, possibly a 1 in a million chance, did not work for him. It’s a shame that whilst accepting it might be a problem with the phone, he seems to misrepresent ALL the Nokia Lumia 900 phones to have this problem. I don’t get it. If he was able to connect to the WiFi, download large games over WiFi etc, the browser should also have worked :S. I’m sure he had many contacts he could have checked with whether it was normal or a widespread issue. I pray it’s just Walt’s handset. Nokia can’t really afford critical bugs right now. It might be a batch hardware problem? My batman Lumia takes much better pictures and the screen is much more vivid and brighter and the battery lasts longer than the test lumia I got :S

The funniest thing I find is that Walt complains that the camera is more saturated than the iPhone. The king of false saturation. Oh no. PureView Lumia can’t come soon enough. Even N8 cam would suffice to beat pretty much all cam phones. Meh. Damn you Windows Phone and your stupid restriction on camera.

Apps is of course an issue, with it only being a ‘fraction’ of iOS as opposed to perhaps having the apps people actually might want.

Back to a few tech places missed. No mention here or the other reviews of WiFi problems.

Windows Phone 7 still has less than 100,000 apps in its catalog but the overall quality of apps tends to be closer to iPhone than Android.

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/hiner/nokia-lumia-900-a-review-for-business-professionals/10441

I wanted to bring this one up again.

Jon Rettinger. No WiFi problem here.

Honest concerns here. The 800×480 screen whilst fine, is way behind if you consider the competition has risen beyond that with either 960×640 or 1280×720 screens.

Camera apparently is just about passable (though as many are saying better than the 800 which didn’t receive much complaints when it was reviewed. It’s sad that it is not the Nokia standard. I simply hate the camera UI. Apart from the lovely touch and take focus and the swipe for gallery, the whole camera UI is unintuitive.

For apps, it doesn’t have as many as iOS but thankfully, Jon doesn’t immediately slam it down, pointing out that he has all the apps he needs or equivalent of it. Conclusion – he’s going to use one of these phones as his daily driver.

Any mention of WiFi browsing not working at all here? No.

http://gigaom.com/mobile/nokia-lumia-900-reviewed-the-windows-phone-to-get/

Thanks everyone for the tip!

Category: Lumia, Nokia, Windows Phone