Say what you will about how Nokia’s handled their smartphone strategy over the past few years, there’s one thing that the Finnish handset vendor almost never gets wrong, and that’s building devices that can take a beating. Case in point, Singaporean operator Singtel, who has 416 million customers if you count all the other countries they’re currently in, recently took the Nokia Lumia 800 out onto the streets and asked random strangers to drop the device on the pavement. They all freak out when doing it, because everyone knows what happens when you drop today’s modern glass monoblock smartphones on the ground, but surprise surprise the Nokia Lumia 800 emerges unscathed. Is the video a bit corny? Sure it is, but that’s not the point. Anyone who watches it takes away a key lesson: the Nokia Lumia 800 is hard to break, and if you’re the kind of person who has a terrible case of butter fingers, then it’s the perfect device for you.
Compare that to the iPhone 4 and 4S. Just looking at one the wrong way means it might break. This writer broke the back of his iPhone 4 within the first 3 months of owning it. It’s expected that the sixth generation iPhone will be much more robust, but people are still going to end up putting it in a case and masking away whatever beautiful design Apple’s Jony Ive comes up with. Meanwhile, the Lumia 800 is gorgeous and you don’t need to baby it, much less put it in a case, for it to withstand the harsh conditions of urban life. The most exciting thing about the Lumia 800 is that it’s just the first of what’s sure to be a portfolio of devices that have similar characteristics.
The design language of Nokia’s 2012 lineup isn’t just going to be pretty, but it’s going to be able to walk out of a bar fight with nary a scratch on its face.
[Via: The Nokia Blog]