San Francisco based designer Gadi Amit has come back from CES and spotted a major shift in smartphone design - the design of the Nokia Lumia 800 not only caught his eye, but is striking and bold enough that he hopes "...the outstanding work evident in these products will catapult Nokia and Microsoft back into the forefront of mobile technology."

Let me be clear, Nokia’s phones are better than Apple’s, both in terms of physical and digital design. Supple, amiable, vibrant, and durable, the Lumia 800 and the slightly larger 900 are the new kings of smartphone design. The body has an original signature corner that combines two forms: the vertical tubular main form meets a rounded window for the screen. It’s a fresh look at a detail many mobile phone designers tackled before. The Apple halo effect forced many design teams toward the familiar solution: a two-dimensional rounded form surrounding a screen. Nokia was brave enough to forge its own path to arriving at highly effective way of differentiating the Lumia from the rest of the pack.

There's no doubt that the design of the Lumia 800 and 900 has been one of the most eye-catching Windows Phone designs out there, and is something that almost every review has pointed out. In my experience handing the Lumia 800 over to someone so they can "have a play" involves a lot of spinning the phone around to look at the outside before heading to the touch screen and the complementary Metro UI internals.

This is now the point where N9 fans will jump in and say they got the design first... but sometimes life isn't that simple. The design is a Nokia design, and they are getting as much benefit from it as they can.