Nokia at CES 2012

Clearly, Nokia’s getting a lot of attention at CES this year, and for good reason: the Lumia 900 is in the first batch of LTE-enabled Windows Phones and the Lumia 710 launched on T-Mobile just this week, marking the company’s reentrance into the hardscrabble US market. That puts Chris Weber, president of Nokia’s US business, in the hot seat — and we sat down with him this week to get his thoughts on the prospects for success.

Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore, VP for Windows Phone, dropped by our CES HQ this week to discuss Microsoft’s mobile future. He was classically reluctant to reveal the specifics of that future, though he did say that the words Tango and Apollo “sound nice.” He did share his thoughts on how Windows Phone differs from iOS and Android, positioning it as the happy balance between the two leaders in mobile software. You get the greater variety of Android with the reassurance of tighter quality control that Apple offers. Quality, in fact, was the overriding theme of what Joe had to say. According to him, having a better user experience is what will differentiate Windows Phone from the competition, not extreme specs or barrel-scraping prices.

Nokia’s official US Twitter stream and our own photos have confirmed a commonly held suspicion: the Lumia 900 doesn’t have a Pentile Matrix subpixel layout. Unlike the Lumia 800, its AMOLED display has its subpixels in an RGB arrangement instead of RGBG. The effect of this change is that you’ll get better fine-grain detail on the 900 while also avoiding the subtle color-fringing that the Lumia 800 exhibits on high-contrast edges (such as between black and white). Nokia has been somewhat evasive about this issue up until that tweet, perhaps in an effort not to diminish its other AMOLED displays. Still, we’d say this is easily the best undocumented upgrade of CES 2012.

Although Nokia calls the displays on all three of its Lumia devices ClearBlack — with that branding referring to the anti-reflective polarizer — the underlying display tech differs. See below for a comparison.

Update: We just spent some more time with Nokia’s latest, and while the phone was running a test software build that prevented us from digging too deep, you can consider us very intrigued.

Samsung and HTC are also expected to unveil LTE-equipped Windows Phone devices today, both running on a pre-tango operating system update. Nokia’s rolling thunder US marketing push looks set to execute today, so keep your eyes on our live blog from Nokia’s CES 2012 press conference at 3pm (PT) today for full details.