Collecting The Nokia Lumia-800

So the day finally arrived , and it was time to travel to Huddersfield and collect my Nokia Lumia-800 phone from Fonebooth, my nearest Nokia Care Point to be participating in The Amazing Collective, a group set up by Nokia to recieve and use there new Windows Phone. As far as I can make out, the Collective is made up of bloggers, Twitterers (if that's a word ?) and forum members who will all get a Lumia to use as there main phone to use and to participate in various events and give feedback to Nokia in order to promote and improve the handset.

I was informed of the Collective a few weeks ago via email, but due to my recent holiday, today was the first chance I'd had to arrange to accept the very generous offer from Nokia, some of my friends on the Nokia Support Discussions forum had already received there handsets, and from what I read on Twitter , were thoroughly enjoying them, having tried the phone briefly at Nokia World, I was both keen and excited to try it long term as it were, to try and quell the initial doubts I'd had about it, but more of that when I've had chance to thoroughly try and test the phone, and actually used it in anger.

I set off for my 3.30 appointment at about 2.30, giving me plenty of time to travel the 19 miles or so from my house in Calverley, Nr Leeds to Huddersfield, where I was to collect the phone and have some training on how to use it. I used Nokia Maps on my E7 to actually find the store, and had to use walking guidence for the last few hundred yard as the Fonebooth was located in a pedestrian precinct, The Shambles, in Huddersfield. I actually arrived a little early, so took a couple of photos before going in to introduce myself, the chap behind the counter said being early wasn't an issue and offered me a coffee (first time I've been offered a coffee in a phone shop!) I was also told that the guy who was to show me how to use the Lumia was off ill and that one of the other shop assistants would deal with the paperwork and demo and setup of the phone. Anyway after a few minutes a guy called Shabbat came from the back room with a blue box, some paperwork and a coffee, and we sat down at a table in the shop and he checked my ID and began to go through the necessary paperwork and open the box, the small plain blue box Shabbat bought out, turned out to contain a full retail boxed Lumia-800, containing the phone, case, charger, usb cable, headphones and instruction leaflet. As Shabbat hadn't actually been trained for the event, he wasn't exactly sure how the micro sim was incerted in the phone, as I was, I took charge and removed the micro sim from my N9 and put it into th Lumia. Shabbat then booted up the phone and proceded to set the basics up, asking me to put in passwords and log ins as required. He also used the phones camera to read some bar codes on the paperwork to download two apps that had to be installed on the phone as part of the participation in the Amazing Collective, one was 'Amazing Collective' a link to the Facebook page associated with the scheme and the other was 'VIP Registration' (never been a VIP before, and not really sure it's appropriate, but it's on there anyway !) So, within about ten minutes, we were up and running and ready to go, all my contacts had synced as I'd already used a Lumia with my Live account previously, and the last thing to happen was that my photo was taken with the phone in my hand, whether that photo will ever appear anywhere, I don't know, but according to @psychomania666 from Twitter and http://nokiainspired.blogspot.com/ , the same thing happened when he collected his unit :)

I had a brief look at the phone before leaving the shop, and in the Amazing Collective, there seems to be some sort of league, and I was in 60^th position, so can only assume that there are another 440 people to follow me, as the number of people being invited to the collective, AFAIK, is 500 ! As I left the store I made my first Tweet on the phone to announce thet I was finally in the Lumia 'Club' and went back to my car to drive home, because I'm a Geek , I decided to try the Drive app on the way home just to see how it compared to Nokia Maps on Symbian, unfortunately I couldn't download any maps to the phone as WIFI is required so the set up of the route was a little slow, however it would allow me to download a voice for the guidance, and once the phone had cached some map data on the fly, the guidance was very good !!

Up to now I've spent very little time 'tinkering 'with the Lumia-800, really just charged it up fully (the navigation sucked the partial charge it came out of the box with) set the camera settings to 'Normal' as the handset arrived, as I'd expected from reading an article on the web by Richard Dorman (@Sheridan01 on Twitter) on his blog http://onlyfoolsandmobiles.com/ with the default camera setting set to 'Macro', loaded some music and videos via Zune, and with some difficulty managed to install and set the ringtone I like to use on all my phones (not found a way to customise alert tones yet and don't know if it's possible ?)

Well that's about it for now really,I now have a phone using all the different operating systems that Nokia use in smart phones, the days and weeks ahead, will hopefully find me becoming familiar with the Lumia and Windows Phone, and I really hope, and am pretty confident that I will love it, but only time will tell, and as soon as I think I've mastered it and given it a fair 'crack of the whip' I will do my best to give an accurate and fair review, until then all I can offer is a few photos, which as usual are of a fairly poor quality as I live in a cave :-)

Thanks for reading,

Stephen Quin