Nokia Lumia 900

Best smartphone of the CES 2012 show this year has to be the Nokia Lumia 900 with Windows phone 7.5 at last making a punch in the mobile phone market.

"It's the first one built for and designed for the North American market," said Stephen Elop, Nokia's CEO. He unveiled the new phone at CES in Las Vegas.

The Lumia 900 is somewhat larger version of the overseas Lumia 800 model and Polycarbonate never looked so good. The 900 additions: the larger, 4.3-inch screen (as with the 800: AMOLED, at 800 x 480 resolution); support for LTE/4G cellular. The Qualcomm 1.4GHz CPU and 512MB of RAM should make Windows Phone 7.5 just as quick and smooth as it is on the 800 and 710 models.

The back camera has a 28-millimeter focal length, meaning users can squeeze more into photos than with most camera phones. The Lumia 900 also has a front-facing camera for video conferencing.

Nokia worked closely with app developers to create apps that really take advantage of the Windows Phone "Metro" user interface, said Kevin Shields, a senior vice president at Nokia. He showed off ESPN and CNN apps that Nokia helped develop. "We're going to make the sports nuts who are Lumia customers delighted," said Nokia.

Both Microsoft and Nokia are hoping to boost lagging performance in mobile phones, which I think we all agree that of we have a great Windows mobile OS, then most of us would welcome a Windows unit to sync more effectively with our Windows desktop. Microsoft had just 1.5 percent share of the worldwide smartphone market in the third quarter of 2011, down from 2.7 percent in the previous year, according to research from Gartner. Nokia was still the top phone maker, with 23.9 percent share of the mobile device market in the third quarter. But its share has been steadily declining over the years; it dropped from 28.2 percent in the third quarter of 2010, Gartner found.

Nokia have no launch date for this phone yet as well as  no details of the price tag. T-mobile may be the first operator to offer the unit in the UK.