Nokia’s new Lumia 800 model finally goes on sale, and the first time the Finnish giant will really be able to gauge what consumers really think of their first credible offering in a number of years.

The Lumia 800 features a premium polycarbonate uni-body design, a 1.4 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, 512 MB of RAM, a Clear Black AMOLED display with a WVGA resolution of 800×480 and an 8 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics.

The phone also features 16GB of internal storage as well as a unique curved glass display.

As analysts CCS Insight put it, “Nokia still faces a Herculean task to re-establish itself in the smartphone market, which will remain dominated by Google Android and Apple in the near term.”

The key difference between Nokia past and present is its new tie-up with Microsoft.

Stephen Elop, a former Microsoft executive, decided the Finnish giant should switch to Windows from the dog-eared ‘Symbian’ almost as soon as he took over.

But with Google now occupying more than half of all UK smartphone sales and launching its own flagship model.

Plus Apple’s creative dominance well-established, it’s no wonder that Nokia is accompanying the new Lumia 800 model with an unprecedented marketing push.

Entire buildings will be used as posters for projectors, network Orange is even giving a free Xbox 360 to Lumia customers and it will be hard to avoid Nokia’s new slogan“The Amazing Everyday”.

it’s those networks who are desperate for Nokia and its Microsoft Windows Phone operating system to succeed.

A new front against Apple and Google dominance will generate further interest in smartphones.

Nokia Lumia users will, later in the year, be able to create personalised channels from a global catalogue of millions of tracks and with Nokia Music’s Gigfinder search for live local music as well as the ability to share discoveries on social networks and buy concert tickets.