Nokia Lumia 800 and Nokia Lumia 710: Which one is a better pick?

The Windows phone is the latest flavor of the season. Most of the popular manufacturers like Samsung, HTC have been seen riding the Windows Phone wave and the latest one to hop the bandwagon is Nokia.

The Finnish giant unveiled its first Windows Phone powered devices - Nokia Lumia 800 and Lumia 710 in India today. Priced at Rs 29,000 and Rs 19,000, the smartphones will be available in India in December.

We examine the features and functions that the two offer and which one is more likely to woo the Indian consumers.

Beginning with the form factor, Nokia 710 bears close resemblance to the Nokia 603. The device sports a 3.7-inch touchscreen and is seen as a budget windows phone. Coming from the same "Lumia" family is another gem, Nokia 800. This super stunning device bears close resemblance to the N9 and matches its sibling Nokia 701 in terms of screen size and resolution at 3.7-inch screen (480x800 pixels). Both the devices are also seen sporting Nokia’s ClearBlack technology and anti-glare coating.

What makes Nokia 800 pricey is its construction - the more advanced unibody comprising of polycarbonate. In comparison the Nokia 710 has a simple design and comes with interchangeable colored Windows back panels. The fancy Amoled technology and curved glass display in Nokia 800 also gives it additional brownie points as opposed to the regular flat TFT in Nokia 710.

On the camera front too, Nokia 800 takes a lead. It comes with a much appreciated 8-megapixel primary camera with a 3x digital zoom. Capable of capturing a video recording at 720p, it has a highly advanced Carl Zeiss optics. Also available are some handy features like geo-tagging, face detection, red-eye reduction, continuous autofocus, touch focus, exposure compensation and white balance and blur reduction. The Nokia 710 while not as spectacular as its sibling, does not disappoint you entirely. It packs in a descent 5-megapixels (2596x1460 pixel resolution), LED flash and possesses recording capabilities of 720p.

Running under the hood of both the devices is a powerful single core 1.4GHz processor with the same Qualcomm MSM8255 chipset and graphics processor along with a 512 MB RAM.

Both Nokia 800 and Nokia 710 come equipped with Nokia’s purpose-built free applications along side the standard Windows Phone platform. The collection includes Nokia Drive, a system that provides a turn-by-turn online and offline navigation, Nokia Music that enables users to download as well as play tracks offline and ESPN Sports Hub, a aggregated sports news feed.

The two devices however vary in their storage capacity. While the Nokia 710 has 8GB capacity the Nokia 800 has standard 16GB with integrated cloud computing and 25 GB of free SkyDrive storage. What is quite disappointing is the fact that while Nokia 710 has a card slot for expansion upto 16GB, Nokia 800 comes with without a card slot at all.

A 3G enabled phone, Nokia 800 offers a talktime up to 9.5 h (maximum) 3G talk time and 335 h ( maximum) 3G standby time while Nokia 710 offers a 7.6 h maximum 3G talk time and about 400 h 3G standby time.