Nokia Lumia 900

The good: The Nokia Lumia 900's eye-popping unibody design sets a new direction for smartphone style. Its LTE speeds, vivid 4.3-inch screen, and 8-megapixel camera are high points.The bad: Problems with call quality and minor design flaws like some gaps in the construction and weirdly placed buttons get in the way. The designer camera optics are good, but they don't live up to the hype. The phone shoots 720p video rather than 1080p video.The bottom line: The Nokia Lumia 900's unique design and high-end features make Windows Phone look fantastic, and the $99 price is extremely fair. Despite some flaws, this is my favorite Windows Phone yet.Photo gallery:Nokia Lumia 900 Nokia sorely needs a "hero" smartphone with the looks, the speeds, the specs, and a price that will hush the doubters. With the Lumia 900, Nokia proves that it has the chops to compete. We thought so at CES, where we awarded it best new smartphone, and I think so now.

Features

Since Windows Phone OS pretty much behaves the same on every handset, it's the extras that are important. LTE was the most crucial feature Nokia needed to sell this phone on our shores, and it'll be one of the first two Windows phones with LTE. (The HTC Titan II, which goes on sale the same day, is the other.)Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth are standards, though sadly, the Lumia 900 ships with Bluetooth 2.1, practically antique compared with the new Bluetooth 4.0 standard we're starting to see in mobile devices.Windows Phone OS handily provides e-mail and social networking integration through account log-ins in the settings, an option for linking inboxes together, and support for group messaging. There's also threaded text and multimedia messaging, and a cool feature that can weave together messages sent between IM and traditional texts. Task-switching, voice search, and scan searches with Bing are also included, as are conference calling and voice dialing.