The highly anticipated Nokia Lumia 800 is the result of a forced marriage between Nokia N9 (which was already in development) and Microsoft's Windows Mobile 7.5 mango software.
We all know why. Microsoft wanted to expand its quasi-monopoly position in desktop, mobile and Nokia watched the ground fall out of the dominance of the smartphone market thanks to competition from iPhone and Android.
But one should not judge a descendant of the circumstances of its origin. This is a sleek good looking phone with a sophisticated curved glass, 3.7in touchscreen extruded in a body from a single piece of plastic.
It has produced the best looking phone either company, and if it works properly, it has the best user interface (with easy-to-read blue tiles) either has produced - albeit not in the iPhone class.
There's the rub. To get the most out of this phone - especially the way he integrates social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter on the home screen (with e-mail, text and journal alerts) - You must not only your SIM card snipped Sun it fits into the micro-SIM slot, but you also have to cater to the entire Microsoft "ecosystem". What? It is a walled garden, but renamed.
That will be no problem at all - in fact, one major advantage - the many millions who are already on Hotmail or Windows Live and probably get a seamless transition to a fully integrated experience. This is a huge market potential.
But for those like me who believe in more, it's a bit of a problem. I could upload Gmail to the home screen (although strangely not Twitter or Facebook yet, despite the help of Nokia technicians, who will not be an option for a typical buyer). There must be something simple, like others have succeeded, and both are supported by the phone.
Instead, I loaded apps from the market, which worked very well from a secondary screen. There are a variety of Microsoft's Virtual Earth or Maps (which are great because the data is embedded on the phone, so you do not need a data connection). But when I download I tried Google Maps "wrong file type." Funny that. If you want to get the most out of this phone, you need to use it as your calendar, and other basics.
Curiously, the photo-hosting site Flickr, which I use daily, are not supported - probably because they think all uploads to Facebook these days.
Undoubtedly there will be an app later. Stranger still, there are Bluetooth (for wireless phone), but it will not transfer photos to your computer. Maybe the world is going too fast for me. At the beginning I could not all compounds at all, but that turned out, as the settings for pay-as-you-go SIM card has not yet been installed.
A big plus for this phone is the Nokia 8-megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss lens. Nokia has been slow to market one of the major selling points - which means that if you have a camera phone like this, you do not need a digital camera at all for almost all purposes.


The leading apps and once had more than one million developers on its books - If Nokia is written on the outside of the phone is inside of Microsoft, whose embryonic App Store has supplanted that of Nokia dominates.
It has some useful familiar apps - Shazam. Kindle, Last.fm, etc. on board - but still far behind the iPhone and Android alternatives. The search engine is Microsoft's image-guided Bing, with a voice command, which works well for simple queries like "restaurants in Westminster".
There are many other standard features such as radio and music, not to mention Microsoft's enterprise software - but the thing is it has a comparative advantage over other models is the Xbox Live feature. Otherwise, this is a beautifully designed catch-up phone.
A feature that could, given it was an advantage over the iPhone NFC (Near Field Communication), which will be great for the payment of invoices by waving your phone at the cash register. The Nokia N9 - which is sold in some markets, but not the UK - has installed NFC, and a slightly bigger screen. Why did it leave from the Lumia? Maybe they thought it might give a free ticket to the next Google "wallet" mobile payment system.
Meanwhile, the Lumia (around £ 399 sim free or contract) is liked by many people, especially in the Microsoft community - but it's not a game for the iPhone.