After several years of playing catch-up to rivals, Nokia today came up with its first Windows Phone, a long-awaited gizmo that finally looks the part and which could resurrect the Finnish giant’s ailing smartphone business.

The Lumia 800, unveiled at its annual Nokia World conference, comes with all the bells and whistles expected today – a 3.7-inch AMOLED screen, 1.4GHz processor and an 8-meg Carl-Zeiss lens, for starters.

Notably, there’s no SD card slot, so the 16GB onboard will have to do for your apps, movies, songs and pictures. The good news for music lovers is that it supports FLAC natively, so you can play back your high-res music tracks without having to convert them to MP3s.

As expected, the Lumia 800 looks identical to the N9 first shown at CommunicAsia in June. The main difference is that it runs Microsoft’s much-heralded Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango” operating system, which has more apps available than the N9′s Meego OS. The design has wowed critics with a unique curved glass screen, which seems to float like a “pillow” on the main frame.

So the Lumia 800 has a massively improved OS, which now contends well with Android and iPhone devices, and it is backed by a good-looking design. Is this the return that Nokia has hinted at all these months, after hitting rock bottom earlier this year? …

When Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 launched last year, it received largely positive reviews, including from us. But there was a nagging sense that it was incomplete, and there were a lot of tiny but important features missing.

With the follow-up officially known as Windows Phone 7.5 (codenamed Mango) now out on new phones as well as an update on existing models this month, the platform is proving to be a capable OS with enough features on take on both iOS and Android.

People who have never used WP7 before this will probably find it difficult to spot most of these improvements, as the user experience remains consistent. So without further ado, let’s dive into our Goondu review! …

HTC is shipping its first smartphone with Microsoft’s much-awaited “Mango” version of Windows Phone come October, and the price of S$569 – well below the usual S$800 to S$900 for top-end models – is likely to make rivals sit up.

The HTC Radar will come in the Taiwanese phone maker’s usual unibody design seen in other popular makes like the Sensation and sport a number of mid-range features. These include a 3.8-inch screen and a 5-meg camera, capable of a useful f2.2 feature for shots with low depth of field, which will complement Microsoft’s standard features such as Xbox Live games offerings.

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Microsoft has sent its next iteration of the Windows Phone software to handset makers, as it wraps up the operating system’s features and software code ahead of a launch in Fall 2011.

The so-called Mango update, unveiled two months ago, promises a number of fixes and updates to the original Windows Phone, which looked great when launched late last year but had an uphill struggle taking on Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS devices. …

A couple of days after the next major software upgrade to the Windows Phone 7 platform was announced in the US, Singapore too got its taste of “Mango” on Friday, as Microsoft offered the media here a preview into what’s in store for this up and rising mobile operating system.

The Mango release will be available to all current Windows Phone 7 models for free as a software update later this year, with Q4 as the projected time frame. Microsoft also mentioned that Nokia Windows Phones will be the first phones to ship with Mango, so we can speculate that we’ll see at least one model from Nokia this year. …