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Nokia’s latest shot at Apple’s dominance: The Lumia 800, their first Windows Phone smartphone

It’s not like Nokia’s been able to produce a serious threat to Apple’s handset so far or that its management’s vision was comparable to that of Steve Jobs and his management team. The ailing handset maker (Apple recently beat Nokia to become the leading smartphone maker in the world) under the new team led by Stephen Elop made a huge gamble by going to bed with Microsoft. Today, the company took the wraps off its brand new device dubbed the Lumia 800, Nokia’s first smartphone powered by Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7.5 ‘Mango’ software. Build quality and the design seem attractive and follow the theme of the ill-fated N9.

Inside, the Lumia 800 packs in an eight-megapixel back camera with Carl Zeiss optics, a 3.7-inch AMOLED ClearBlack curved display and is powered by a 1.4GHz processor. Besting Apple’s iCloud which offers 5GB of free cloud storage for device backups, settings, app data and other content, the Lumia 800 includes 25GB of Microsoft’s SkyDrive storage which can only be used to store music and pictures in the cloud. The music service Nokia Music and turn-by-turn navigation service Nokia Drive are also part of Nokia’s offering.

Check out the promo clip included below (nice chiptune, by the way). The Verge has handy comparison photos of the Lumia 800 vs. iPhone 4S vs. HTC Titan plus a hands-on video after the break and ZDNet provides a handy list of what’s there and what’s not, if you’re interested.

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The phone is now available for pre-order and will arrive in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom in November. Following the initial roll out into these markets, Nokia said the Lumia 800 will be landing in Hong Kong, India, Russia, Singapore and Taiwan “before the end of the year” and debut in other markets in “early 2012″. A deal-breaker? It won’t be available in the United States in 2011.
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