Mr. Elop, a former senior Microsoft executive who made the decision to enter the software alliance with his former employer in February, said the new Lumia devices showed that Nokia, which is based in Espoo, Finland, was delivering on his promise of a turnaround. “This signals our intent to be today’s leader in smartphone design and craftsmanship,” Mr. Elop told 3,000 people attending the company’s Nokia World conference in London. 
 
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 During an interview, Mr. Elop said Nokia was planning to push its smartphones into the United States, where it has struggled, early next year. He said Nokia was in advanced talks with the four major American operators, which together sell more than 90 percent of all cellphones in the country. Nokia’s new smartphones for the United States, Mr. Elop said, will run on high-speed 4G networks that use a technology called LTE, or Long Term Evolution, as well as on older 3G networks. 
 
 They will also be made to run on networks that use the C.D.M.A. standard, which is used by the market leader, Verizon Wireless. 
 
 Mr. Elop said that Nokia was listening closely to phone operators and would be flexible in meeting their demands. “If you do the math, you may come to the conclusion that clearly we are in good conversations with those operators,” he said 
 
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 Microsoft, based in Redmond, Wash., is using its business connections — its server software powers a lot of cloud computing centers used by network operators — to help Nokia re-establish relationships with American operators, he said. “When we enter a market, it is not just dipping your toe in the market, but coming in with the appropriate levels of investment by us,” Mr. Elop said. “It takes work. It takes money. We are being very deliberate.” 
 
 With Lumia, Nokia aims to beat Apple and Google by designing handsets that are easier to use than the two best-selling smartphones, the Apple iPhone 4S and the Samsung Galaxy S II, which runs Google’s Android software. The Lumia 800’s start screen is a wheel of interactive tiles. By clicking a tile, users are taken directly to a preferred task, like text messaging a friend, tracking a sports team or listening to a favorite song, without having to enter and close applications. 
 
 The software interface, developed by Microsoft but refined by Nokia, is designed to remove as much laborious touch-screen tapping as possible. Marko Ahtisaari, Nokia’s head designer, said the smartphones used fluid, rather than linear, design logic, which eliminated many of the intermediary steps required with the array of static app icons that Apple and Google’s Android favor. 
 
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 Shares of Nokia closed at 4.80 euros, down 0.6 percent, in European trading. 
 
 One investor said that Nokia and Microsoft must still overcome skepticism about the venture. “I have seen no evidence that Nokia and Microsoft are making a game of it — yet,” said Jeffrey P. Davis, the chief investment officer at Lee Munder Capital, an investment fund manager based in Boston with $5.4 billion under management. “Android is winning the mind space on the consumer front. The business world will probably follow.” 
 
 Neil Mawston, an analyst at Strategy Analytics, estimated that Nokia was paying $15 to Microsoft for each Windows smartphone it produced, less than the estimated $20 other handset makers must pay. The new Windows phone lineup, he said, has the potential to help restore Nokia’s fortunes in the smartphone market. 
 
 “One thing I have learned in this business is to never say never,” Mr. Mawston said. 

 Nokia 
 
 A few weeks ago we giggled when we realized that the name of the virtual personal assistant built into the iPhone 4S vaguely sounds like a Japanese term for "buttocks," but now we're just shaking our heads in disappointment as yet another tech company stumbles its way through the product naming process. 
 
 How on earth did smartphone maker Nokia not realize that the names of its latest devices — the Lumia 800 and the Lumia 710 — happen to match a colloquial term for "prostitute" in Spanish? 
 
 Twitter 
 
 Now, I am — despite what some frequently seem to assume based on my given name — not a native Spanish speaker, so I had to consult a handful of dictionaries to confirm that this awkward translation was accurate after hearing about it on Twitter. 
 
 The squeaky clean reference texts sitting on my bookshelf were of no help, but that wasn't surprising — they fail to include most slang terms. That was not a problem though, because the Real Academia Española and Google Books came to the rescue. 
 
 The Real Academia Española is an institution that is considered one of the authorities of the Spanish language. According to its online dictionary, "lumia" is a synonym for "prostituta." 
 
 Real Academia Española 
 
 And in case you're wondering whether "prostituta" just happens to sound similar to the English term for a lady of the night, let's set things straight: 
 
 Real Academia Española 
 
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 Yes, that translates as "Person who has sex for money." 
 
 Now, I know that someone out there is currently shouting "I'm a fluent speaker of Spanish and I've never heard this definition! You're wrong about this whole thing, Rosa! WRONG! The dictionary is wrong! Everything is wrong!" 
 
 And that's where Google Books steps in with an explanation as to why some Spanish speakers might not be familiar with this translation of the word "lumia." 
 
 Der Gitanismo im spanischen Argot 
 
 Google's clever book-searching tool pulls up a German text called "Der Gitanismo im spanischen Argot" by a fellow named Bernhard Helzle-Drehwald. (The title loosely translates as "The Gypsy in Spanish slang.") This particular book explains that the word is the result of Gypsy dialects slipping into the Spanish language. It is not a particularly commonly used term and only appears in Spanish dialects with heavy Gypsy influences. 
 
 This may explain why the folks at Nokia did not realize that they were giving their latest products an awkward name, but I still don't see it as an excuse — someone should've cracked open an etymology book or twenty at some point during the product naming process and researched things. 
 
 Related stories: 
 
 Want more tech news, silly puns, or amusing links? You'll get plenty of all three if you keep up with Rosa Golijan, the writer of this post, by following her on Twitter, subscribing to her Facebook posts, or circling her on Google+. 

 SUNNYVALE, Calif. — Say what you will about Nokia’s smartphone lineup, there’s no arguing the company can coordinate an international press launch. Just mere hours ago, Nokia president Stephen Elop announced his company’s comeback products, the Lumia 710 and 800 smartphones, in London. And now here I sit in Nokia’s Northern California headquarters, enjoying some hands-on time with the new handsets to deliver my quick-and-dirty first impressions. 
 
 First off, the Lumia 800 is indeed a doppelganger of the N9 smartphone that I played with last week. But where the N9 comes loaded with the soon-to-be-obsolete MeeGo operating system, the Lumia 800 runs Mango, the latest version of Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS — an OS that Nokia hopes will save its smartphone platform from a slow-burn into irrelevance. 
 
 Like a toy made for the child of an industrial design snob, the 800 is elegant, sleek, and a far cry from the company’s clunky 8000 series phones of yesteryear. Just like the N9 that preceded it, the 800 will be available in three shades — cyan, magenta and black. All process colors! 
 
 The 800′s slightly-curved 3.7-inch AMOLED display looks fantastic at its 800×480 resolution, just as it did on the N9. Also included is the fantastic Carl Zeiss Optics back-facing camera, capable of snapping gorgeous photos with its f/2.2 lens, and at an especially fast rate. 
 
 Under the hood, the 800 runs a single-core 1.4GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor backed by 512MB of RAM. Together, the silicon combo kept us smoothly humming through the phone’s menu screens. While Nokia acknowledges there are phones that come equipped with faster, dual-core processors, it says a close relationship with Microsoft throughout development enabled better hardware/software integration, and the phone will perform just as well (if not better) than competitors. 
 
 The 800 comes with 16GB of internal storage, but no SD card support. Nokia says this was intentional, to keep the smooth outer polycarbonate shell as eye-pleasing as possible. No cracks, no lines, no unnecessary ports. To mitigate the lack of an SD card slot, Nokia provides 25GB of SkyDrive cloud-based storage with the purchase of the 800. 
 
 The star of the show, of course, is the Mango OS. The 800 is the first Nokia device to run Windows Phone 7.5, one of many promised WP7.5-laden handsets to come in 2012. We’ve enjoyed Mango since we first saw it last month. Because the user interface is so drastically different than what we’re used to with Android and iOS, it comes as a refreshing change of pace. 
 
 With the Lumia 800, you get most of what you’ve already seen in other Mango-powered Windows Phone models, along with a few added perks. Nokia worked with Microsoft to develop Nokia Drive, a voice-powered turn-by-turn navigation system that works in more than 100 countries, and is exclusive to Lumia phones. There’s also Nokia Maps, which is exactly what it sounds like. Both services were previously unavailable to Windows Phone-powered devices. 
 
 Nokia claims up to 13 hours of talk time battery life, with 265 hours of stand-by power, and 55 hours of music playback. 
 
 And, yes, there was another Lumia model announced today, the 710. Although the 800 and 710 share many similarities — same 1.4GHz processor, same custom-made Nokia apps like Drive and Maps, same Mango OS — the 710 trails the specs of the 800 in two key areas: Its rear camera is just 5 megapixels (not the 8-megapixel stunner), and onboard storage tops out at 8GB. 
 
 Both displays measure 3.7 inches, but the 710′s is a regular-old TFT instead of the 800′s fancy AMOLED. Side-by-side, the two phones reveal markedly different display quality. The 800 is bright and crisp, and makes the 710 seem dull by comparison. If you’re a screen snob, you’ll want to go with the pricier model. 
 
 Lastly, the 710 comes with attractive rubberized back covers in five different colors, all of which are interchangeable. That’s not the case for the 800: Once you choose one of the three 800 model colors, you’re sticking with it till your next phone upgrade (for better or worse). 
 
 OK, now here’s the really bad news: The phones are currently available for pre-order in Europe only, and won’t arrive stateside until after the holiday season. Nokia reps told us “early 2012,” and they’re shooting for sooner rather than later. No U.S. carriers announced yet, either. Expect the Lumia 800 to cost around $600 retail, while the 710 will cost around $380 (sans contract subsidies, of course).
– Struggling Finnish phone maker Nokia is trying to make a comeback with a pair of new smartphones, Wired reports. The Lumia 800 and Lumia 710 are the result of an eight-month collaboration with Microsoft. The phones—priced at around $600 for the 800 and $380 for the 710—are "the first real Windows phones," Nokia says. Both phones run Mango, the latest version of Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS, and early reviews are very positive. "Nokia really needed this to happen today, and this is a new start for the company,” an analyst tells the New York Times. "This helps stop the bleeding and will help Nokia get back in the game." The Lumias will go on sale in Europe first, with a US launch expected in early 2012. The company may encounter some problems in Spanish speaking markets, however: MSNBC notes that "Lumia" is Spanish slang for "prostitute."