I’m not religious about technology, and certainly not the tech I consume for personal use. Due to my travelling schedule, it HAS to work and be robust. With that in mind, I tend to be rather vocal about choosing technology on merit over brand loyalty.

When I was given a Nokia Lumia 800 I was super excited to be able to evaluate the newest handset from the amalgamated Microsoft/Nokia forge.

I received the handset 2 days before leaving on a 2 week trip to Seattle and the UK, which blows away my seven day factory swap out if anything broken. With that in mind, how's it been so far?

The chassis is sleek and well made in most respect and most features except for the plastic flap covering the micro USB port are well thought out. I can see the plastic flap may turn into a bit of a hindrance in a while when it looses it’s ability to stay closed. This is also the first phone I’ve had in a while that I wasn’t able to add external storage to. Even my creaking BlackBerry sports a 32 GB micro SD card, so does my tablet.

Moving on… Adding accounts for Facebook, LinkedIn, Google mail was super painless. Transferring contacts from my old phone via Bluetooth  was great and the Office 365 integration is fantastic. I spend a lot of time on the road, and Office 365 integration with ActiveSync, Lync and OneNote are a must, since even my Android Tablet does that transparently and here the phone does not disappoint.

I did notice that the phone switched off randomly when doing more than one thing at a time. After browsing the support forums, I installed the Zune client and patched the phone. Note, that you don’t want to touch the phone while patching for the first time, since it likes to switch off as well, requiring a restart of the process. Patching done – hope restored…..Or so I thought.

On the way to the airport I tried the Nokia supplied GPS application, Nokia Drive – it didn’t work very well, seeming to think that we weren’t on the road which we were traveling on, crashing the phone altogether, or again switching the phone off. For a while after the battery state was misreported as too low to switch the phone on. This is after loading the maps for South Africa, Washington State and the United Kingdom in preparation for the possibility of roaming without data.

Bearing in mind that I’m about to leave the country, things aren’t going well so far and the potential confidence loss is massive. after a few minutes the phone switched on again, and everything I needed the phone to do in the airport worked superbly, especially the mobile browsing experience.

This morning I arrived in London to find that in flight mode, the battery lost 20% of it’s charge while in flight mode, while in my bag.

I’m off to find a plug to recharge and find someone to speak to at the Nokia store in Heathrow. While this may be the nicest phone I’ve ever been given, and unless it’s just a duff handset, I may need to buy a better phone to complete the trip.

I’ll keep you posted