Hands on with the Nokia Lumia 900 at CES

More from CES 2012, Sin City, where we've briefly had a chance to get familiar with the Nokia Lumia 900, the Finnish corporation's sacrificial offering at the increasingly cluttered LTE altar to the gods of 4G. The Windows smartphone features a large 4.3-inch AMOLED touchscreen, 8-megapixel camera with a wide-angle Carl Zeiss lens and seven hours of talk time, according to Nokia. First impressions? Really rather good, actually.

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With its announcement, the Lumia 900 becomes the central prong to the Lumia trident of Windows smartphones (between the Lumia 710 and Lumia 800), with which Nokia hopes to address its collapsing market share.

A run-down of the key specs:

• Body: One-piece polycarbonate unit
• Dimensions: 5.03 x 2.7 x 0.45 inches (127.8 x 68.6 x 11.4 mm)
• Mass: 5.6 ounces (160 grams)
• Processor clock speed: 1.4 GHz single-core Qualcomm Snapdragon (the same as inside the 710 and 800)
• Key connectivity: LTE, 3G, WLAN b/g/n
• Touchscreen: 4.3-inch 800 x 480 AMOLED ClearBlack glass capacitive touchscreen
• Rear camera: 8-megapixel sensor and 28 mm wide-angle Carl Zeiss lens, 1280 x 720 30 fps HD video
• Front camera: 1-megapixel sensor, 640 x 480 30 fps video, video calling
• Battery: 1830 mAh, 7 h max. 3G talk time, 300 h max. 3G standby, 60 h max. music playback, 6.5 h max. video playback
• Memory: 14.5 GB mass memory (no micro-SD slot), 512 MB SDRAM
• Operating system: Windows Phone 7.5 Mango

Our first impressions are that Nokia's Lumia 900 has the robustness necessary for a phone this size, to the point that we wonder if this may be the first smartphone for which a case would be surplus to requirements. The large proportions are actually welcome, given that the front face is touchscreen touchscreen touchscreen - and a bright, responsive touchscreen at that. The phone's menus were intuitive to navigate. However, the 900's specification does fall short of some of the other LTE smartphones revealed this week.

Nokia's Lumia 900 will be another AT&T exclusive, although there's no official word on a launch date (other than "the coming months") or pricing. A U.S. release is rumored to fall towards the end of Q1, when cyan and matte black models will be available.

Nokia additionally announced imminent Canadian launches of the Lumia 710 and Lumia 800. The 710 will be exclusive to Rogers Communications, arriving in February for CAD $49.99 on a three-year plan. The 800 will emerge from the mists of ambiguity "soon," exclusive to TELUS and available in black, cyan and magenta.