The white Lumia 800 doesn’t change up the hardware at all, still touting the same Lumia 800 specs. This includes a 1.4GHz processor, 3.8” 800×480 AMOLED ClearBlack curved display, an 8MP Carl Zeiss rear camera, 16GB of internal storage, Windows Phone Mango, FM Radio, and a 1450 mAh battery.

There is really something about the clean look that white brings to the 800, and personally, I kind of prefer it to the original black phone. What do you think? Do you have a color preference when it comes to smartphones?

Espoo, Finland – Nokia announced today that the Nokia Lumia 800 will be available in white, beginning later this month.

Image: Nokia Lumia 800 in white With Windows ® Phone 7.5 software on board, the white Nokia Lumia 800 features head-turning design and the best social and Internet performance, with one-touch social network access, easy grouping of contacts, integrated communication threads and Internet Explorer 9. It features a 3.7-inch AMOLED ClearBlack curved display blending seamlessly into the reduced body design, and a 1.4 GHz processor with hardware acceleration and a graphics processor. The Lumia 800 contains an instant-share camera experience based on leading Carl Zeiss optics, HD video playback, 16GB of internal user memory and free SkyDrive storage for storing images and music.

Lumia smartphones include signature Nokia experiences optimized for Windows Phone, including Nokia Drive, which delivers a full-fledged personal navigation device (PND) with free, turn-by-turn navigation and dedicated in-car-user-interface; and Nokia Music introducing MixRadio*, a free mobile music-streaming application that delivers hundreds of channels of locally-relevant music. Windows Marketplace also gives Lumia users more than 55 000 apps to choose from.

“Since we began selling it late last year, the Nokia Lumia 800 has received rave reviews around the world,” said Ilari Nurmi, Vice President of Product Marketing, Nokia. “Now in white, the Lumia 800 brings with it an even more premium look and feel with its gloss finish, but packed with power and performance underneath its sleek body.”

More information about the Nokia Lumia 800 can be found at www.nokia.com/lumia800.

*Availability of Mix Radio varies market by market

About Nokia
Nokia is a global leader in mobile communications whose products have become an integral part of the lives of people around the world. Every day, more than 1.3 billion people use their Nokia to capture and share experiences, access information, find their way or simply to speak to one another. Nokia’s technological and design innovations have made its brand one of the most recognized in the world. For more information, visit http://www.nokia.com/about-nokia.

Media Enquiries:

Nokia
Communications
Tel. +358 7180 34900
Email: press.services@nokia.com

www.nokia.com

With the Lunar New Year in just a couple of short weeks, Vertu has announced three new luxury handsets that all boast some of kind of dragon-themed design. As is the norm with Vertu, they’ve loaded these phones with high-end materials. There’s the gold and diamond model, as well as the stainless steel and emerald version, plus the one with black stainless steel and ruby. The four-claw dragon on the battery cover is hand-engraved.

Since these are Vertu phones, the actual specs don’t really matter all that much. Rumor has it that they haven’t gone ahead and shifted over to WP7 for this latest generation, sticking to Symbian which they have had for some time already. These are limited edition and are expected to sell for over $26,000 US. Find them in Singapore, if you happen to be out that way and have way too much money to spend.

This big marketing push will take on many approaches, including everything from simple awareness campaigns to incentives for retailers to push Windows Phone devices. There are reports that sales guys could get as much as $10 to $15 per handset sold. The money comes from Microsoft, as well as partners like Nokia and Samsung, and it’s reportedly going to all be spent in “early 2012.” The Nokia Ace from AT&T, in particular, will be getting a “concerted advertising push.”

It’s clear that Android and iOS are the elephants in the room when it comes to smartphone platforms, since only 5.2% of all smartphone subscribers are using Microsoft’s mobile OS. If you thought you were sick of the “To the Cloud” campaign, you’re about to get really sick of Windows Phone… but at least more of the general population will even know of its existence.

New reports are in surrounding the Nokia Ace for AT&T, including confirmation that it is in fact the Lumia 900, which will be sold globally as Nokia’s flagship windows phone.

So what do we know? First off, the phone will feature Windows Phone Mango (not Tango as previously rumored). The device also has 4.3-inch WVGA display, a 1.4GHz Qualcomm CPU, 512MB of RAM, an 8MP camera, and a 1830mAh battery.

Although the device will likely be sold carrier locked, it will contain a 1700MHz band that will work with T-Mobile 3G if a workaround is made to unlock such capability, which is rather likely I’m sure.

The Lumia 900 weighs about 18 more grams than the Lumia 800, due most likely to the bigger screen and LTE radio in the new model.

Expect even more details surrounding the Lumia 900 in the next few days at CES, where rumors also suggest another mid-range Windows Phone, the Lumia 719, will be debuting. Maybe if we are lucky they will even confirm the existence of a possible Nokia Windows 8 tablet while they are at it, one can hope at least.

Yet there seems to be a market out there for people who buy phones that cost over $6000, like those made by Vertu. The ridiculous part of this is that they aren’t even ‘smartphones’, they are just basic phones that look sorta pretty. But most of the time they are just a little bit nicer than average, and often tacky.

What could be worse than spending over $6000 on a ‘dumb’ phone? Perhaps spending $190 for the USB data cable that connects the phone to the PC.  That’s right, the data cable actually costs $190.

I can at least sort of (I guess) understand that the reason a consumer would pay so much is that its a trendy, fashionable item, but what could possibly make a USB cable trendy enough to pay that kind of dough?

It turns out that Nokia owns Vertu, and even they must question the worth of such a brand since they are looking to dump the company on to some unsuspecting buyer, probably in Korea. For anyone out there thats looking to throw away money, I have an idea for you. Why don’t you buy a normal phone that will run 10x better than your Vertu, and then you can build your karma with the leftover money and give someone in need access to clean water.

While Nokia recently made it clear it is only considering tablets at this point and not yet working on them, the idea of a Nokia Tablet has still inspired the imagination of concept artists.

After positive attention for the Nokia Tab Windows 8 tablet concept, a similar designed concept device is now being shown off by YrOnimuS, under the name Nokia 1.

The new concept tablet features an 11.6-inch AMOLED screen, weighs 580 grams, is only 8.5mm thick, supports 1280×800, 2MP front camera, and has a 5MP camera at the back with 1080p video capture capable of 30 fps. The unit also features 2GB or RAM, a 7500 mAh battery, 32/64 GB of internal storage, a Wacom active digitizer, and an ARM processor.

The operating system of course, is Windows 8 for ARM.

Overall, an interesting looking device that certainly has a style that feels at home compared to existing Nokia products. Now we just need to hear official word for Nokia that they are indeed planning to enter the tablet market sooner, rather than later.

Samsung Flexible Screen

The flexible display is soon becoming a reality and could likely hit consumer products in 2012, but the “Samsung Flexible Tablet” takes the concept much further and shows off a device that looks more at home in the Star Wars or Star Trek universes. The device can augment reality with image recognition and even perform perfect two-way translation. The device even has holographic gaming technology. While a cool ‘concept’ it is not a currently achievable concept, at least not for another decade or so.

Philips Beehive

My current HDTV is a Philips, and maybe my next beehive will be too? That’s right, in 2011 Philips actually developed a concept beehive that would actually be able to be used in your home to collect honey. I wonder if apartment complexes have an ordinance in place forbidding beehives? Cool idea, though I don’t know if I’d want a bunch of bees swarming around the house.

Nokia HumanForm

Yet another flexible and bendable communications technology that goes way beyond what we are able to develop with our current technology. The entire front surface is a touch display and interacting involves bending and moving around the phone is strange ways. It just doesn’t seem like a practical design for things like reading email, browsing the net, and video. Still, cool concept I suppose.

NgSOC Concept Bike

The NgSOC bycicle is designed by Edward Kim and Benny Cemoli, featuring an electric design that has a battery pack that powers the vehicle while in electric mode. It is also possible to run in a standard bike mode, or even more uniquely a peddle mode that is supplemented by electrical power. The standard bike mode is also used to charge the battery up. The highly modern and sleek bike also features a smartphone dock receiver that charges the handset on the go. For those that can bike for their in-city commutes, this could certainly be worth a look if it ever went beyond just a concept device. Personally, I don’t think it looks nearly as comfortable as my vintage Schwinn though.

Windows Phone Tango doesn’t sound like it’s going to be nearly as substantial as its tropical fruit-named predecessor, but it will reportedly still bring some new moves to the dance floor. For instance, we’re hearing that it’ll get support for smaller screens, smaller chassis sizes, and even LTE. Considering all the LTE-equipped Droids out there, that’s a good thing for Redmond.

But it takes two to tango! There’s a good chance that Nokia will be showing off its new Nokia 719 and Nokia 900 at CES, both of which could very well ship with Tango right out of the box. The newest WP7 update is rumored to be released “soon” after CES.

Looking a little further down the roadmap to what could be Windows Phone 8, we’re hearing that the “Apollo” update is currently being slated to launch in mid-June 2012. Does this mean you should wait? Or is it likely that existing WP7 and WP7.5 devices will be eligible for the WP8 upgrade?

This sensational feat has the N9 running all the following concurrently:

• MeeGo
• iOS 5
• HTC Sense (Android),
• Windows Phone 7
•  BlackBerry OS
•  Samsung’s TouchWiz (Android again)
• Symbian Anna.

Even if it counts like 6 “Operating Systems” and not 7, it’s still a feat that is demoed in the video link here. I want to apologize for not putting the video up in a window, but there seemed to be some difficulty getting this Chinese-originated video to embed.

Essentially this all-in-Chinese video shows a N9 switching between multiple customized instances. To make this clear, these are merely instances and the N9 is not REALLY running all these operating systems, instead it is customized to look like it is.

This collection of more or less good “customizations” are really most likely running on MeeGo, which is struggles to keep alive and relevant these days.

As Wikipedia teaches us:

Strictly speaking, the Nokia N9 does not run MeeGo 1.2 as its operating system. It instead runs what Nokia refers to as a “MeeGo instance”. During the development of Harmattan (previously marketed as Maemo 6), Nokia and Intel merged their open source projects into one new common project called MeeGo.

Jokes of 7 OSes aside, MeeGo’s chameleon abilities to run many customizations without rebooting remains quite spectacular. MeeGo Tablet UX customization principles were recently reported at the MeeGo Conference 2011 in San Francisco. There’s also quite a sizable MeeGo community that is striving to keep all such “MeeGo instances” relevant.

On top of that, there’s also a distant possibility that MeeGo might have some secret virtualization capabilities, similar to the Android App Player running on Blackberry OS 2.

I don’t believe there are some “instances” of QNX (RIM Blackberry OS), or Apple’s iOS 5.0 somewhere in the wild and running on “wrong” hardware with MeeGo. Still, it may happen one day or maybe not at all, but in any case MeeGo is fun and you should enjoy it if you can and while it lasts.

UPDATE: While still interesting to see a device that runs 7 unique customizations, many of our users have indicated this is in fact a Chinese clone and not the real N9. The real hardware in the clone is somewhat unknown. Still, this $65 clone running 7 different customizations is pretty interesting.

Android is on the rise. In fact, when you look at the sales numbers for Q3 2011 and compare them to the sales numbers for the same period one year prior, you’ll see that Google’s mobile operating system has effectively doubled its market share. This means that Google Android now has an impressive 52.5 percent market share. Compare that to the 25.3 percent it had in Q3 2010.

The recent report comes by way of Gartner, revealing that a total of 60.5 million Android-based smartphones were sold in the third quarter fo this year. The next closest competitor is Nokia with its 19.5 million smartphones sold, but the Finnish company lost more than half its market share compared to 2010 (16.9% vs. 36.3%). Nokia was also the overall leader in mobile sales, but again, its market share shrank from 28.2% to 23.9%.

Apple more or less held steady at 15.0% (compared to 16.6% last year), selling 17.3 million iPhones in Q3. The assumption is that people held off for a while there, waiting to get their hands on the iPhone 4S. When looking at all mobile phones, Apple only accounts for 3.9 percent, compared to the 17.8% enjoyed by Samsung and the 4.8% earned by LG.