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Hands-on video of Nokia Lumia 800 from the Oxford Street Phones4U store

Thank you to the team at Phones4U who invited me down to their huge Oxford Street store today to check out the Nokia Lumia 800.

Now, I was of course at Nokia World for much of the day where I couldn’t move for Lumias, but the reason I wanted to check out Phones4U was to get a real-world perspective from a retailer as soon as humanly possible.

I’m delighted to say that their representative, Cain (the deputy manager), didn’t disappoint.

To be clear, I wasn’t looking for a feature overview or an in-depth walk-through (although I appreciated the opportunity to sit and examine the device in the peace and quiet of their B2B room downstairs). I wanted their first impressions. I wanted to look in the eyes of a chap (or lady) who sells handsets daily and see what he made of the Lumia.

If you’re harbouring a bit of cynicism over Nokia’s entry into the Windows Phone world, prepare to be surprised. Cain lays it straight. He reckons they’ll sell very well. Indeed he pointed out that they’ve already had folk coming into the store today to have a look (driven, perhaps by the Phones4U social media outreach?).

Right, here’s the video:

[Note: I didn’t take Cain’s card so I’m really hoping that I’ve spelt his name correctly.]

[Further note: A geeky point — I edited this video on the train. I imported the video from the Sanyo Xacti into my iPad 2, did the editing then published it via blip.tv’s app when I got into WiFi. Love it!]

6 COMMENTS

  1. I don’t see how this can possibly be viewed as anything close to objective. The chap might be 100% correct in everything he says, but he’s a paid salesman being given what is effectively a 3 minute free advert – how is he possibly going to say anything that’s not completely positive about something that Phones4U have invested considerable time, effort and money in promoting?

    I’m not sure what we your readership can gain from this video at all.

  2. They can look in the whites of the chap’s eyes and they can take my opinion and use it as they wish.
    You are stating the bleeding obvious Alex. Of course they would like to sell handsets and contracts. I doubt that beyond a slightly different bounty offering they actually care *what* they sell.
    Do you think it was incredibly wrong of me to go Nokia World too, where I heard the company’s blatantly self serving message? 😉
    I did the same last week with BlackBerry in San RFrancisco and filmed some companies who had blatantly PAID for a stand at the RIM event 😉
    I blatantly interviewed many of those companies who completely failed to give me an objective position of their firm in the marketplace. No. They have me a message on camera. I published them. I’m delighted. Folk make up their own minds.
    Back to this video: I’ve done this kind of thing before where the phone retailer teams have been considerably less upbeat on the prospects of a particular handset. It was good to get some time with the chap and the team there.

  3. Ewan – I really hope you corrected all his mistakes?

    Such as calling the phone a “800 Lumia”, saying that its got “Windows 7” on it, that you load the camera from the “main” menu…

    Sigh. Knowledge is everything.

  4. I’m not so interested in the message, already know what I need to know about the Lumia 800.  I was more interested in the salesman’s delivery.  I found Nokia’s previous issues were also magnified by third party sales people not being behind the products.  Although this video is anecdotal, it does reveal a + change in attitude toward Nokia’s smartphone offerings.

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