Nokia Lumia 920 Review

Nokia Lumia 920 Review 

By K.M.Guruprasad

Few months back, we had our hands on experience with the Nokia Lumia 920.

It was released in India with great marketing and also with a lot of hype that was already built ! Before we get into the review, check out the hands on video below.

Nokia have always made great phones ! This one is no exception ! Nokia Lumia 920 is easily one of the best looking smartphones available in the market today. The company is betting everything on this device and hey to a certain extent it has delivered ! Does this phone get the Finnish maker to retain its position as the top cellphone maker in the market ? That is a very tuff question to answer. Without any further ado, let us get started.

Design

It seems though Nokia has hired artists to design phones off late ! The design of Lumia 920 has evolved from the iconic Nokia N9. The Finns have just not built a phone here , craftsmanship is what they've strived for, for the sake of both their reputation and success.  The moment you get your hands on this device, you can get to see the incredible importance given to detail. The design and the feel of the phone is every bit, the flagship part !

The phone is made of polycarbonate and comes in different color options. The phone weighs in at 185grams , which is about the same weight as of Nokia communicator , if anyone remembers those ! To compare with the latest devices, it is heavier than the Samsung galaxy note 2. It feels sturdy and solid in hand.

This device runs on a dual core qualcomm snapdraggon s4 processor clocked at 1.5 Ghz and 1000 MB of RAM.

The device has a puremotion HD+ display in the front ( which we'll cover ) with sensors up top , with a earpiece and front facing camera. The bottom of the screen we have the standard back, home and search capacitive buttons. The left hand side of the device is neat without any buttons. We've the volume rockers to the right of the device , below which sits the power button and also the camera shutter key !

The top of the device we've a micro sim tray and 3.5 mm headphone jack. The bottom of the device has standard micro USB port for charging and data transfer and the proprietory microphone.

The back of the device has a Carl Zeiss 8mp autofocus camera and dual LED flash.

Display

The Lumia 920 comes with a puremotion HD+ Display which is one of its key selling points. This is the first capacitive touchscreen to support operation other than fingers, such as gloves, keys etc . There's also the higher than regular refresh rate, which should make scrolling text smoother than ever, though to be honest, we are yet to spot the real-life advantages of that.

This display is 4.5 inch display which is made of Gorilla glass 2 with a resolution of 768 * 1280, which gives it a density of 332 pixels per inch.

This display comes with a second generation Clear back display , although the screen here is LCD and not AMOLED , which nokia used for Lumia 800 and 900. The Lumia 920 display has nice colors and moderately deep blacks. It can't quite match the perfect blacks of AMOLED in complete darkness, but due to its low reflectivity, it's a good performer in everything from moderately-lit to bright environments.

The viewing angles are quite good too and while there's notable brightness loss when you go to extremes, everything on the screen remains legible.

Battery and storage

Since, the device is a unibody, the battery of the device is inaccessible. It has a 2000 mAh battery inside which should help you get through the day of moderate use. Fortunately, Nokia has provided with wireless charging plates to charge the device.

Although windows phone 8 supports external memory card slots, Nokia decided not to provide one , rather they have provided the user with 32gb , in which 25 GB is usable. This is fairly decent because you've access to Microsoft's Skydrive if you wish to . 

User Interface

Nokia Lumia 920 runs on the latest version from Microsoft, windows phone 8. Although windows phone 8 at a first glance looks very similar to Windows phone 7, there are a lot of improvements. Once you unlock the phone, you are in the home screen or the Live tile screen which act as a shortcut to launch apps and also as a tile that displays information relevant to that app.

Most Live tiles display relevant info such as the current date, pending calendar events, missed calls, unread emails and more (third party apps do it too). The Marketplace tile displays the number of updates available, while the Pictures tile is essentially a slideshow of your photos. It's nice to have all that info always available at a glance. It is microsoft's answer to notification center, but we still kinda like it the android way !

With windows phone 8 microsoft has given quite a few customization options such as live tiles can now be resized to three pre defined sizes, lockscreen apps , kids corner etc.

The live tiles is the actual beauty of windows phone. These live tiles if not customized, look every bit the other wp8 devices around and if customized can be entirely unique to your taste and preferences.

Nokia is the only manufacturer who is completely dependent on windows phone unlike samsung and HTC which have android ! The company has not only built great hardware but also have put lots of efforts to software. This becomes evident when you check the poor collection of apps from samsung and HTC. These apps are very beautifully made and are very useful. For instance, MIX Radio is a free service through which a user can stream music and mixes and also can download them for offline use ! Good job Nokia !

The regular killer apps such as nokia maps and nokia drive are there for all the navigational purposes ! Since, Nokia have had a history of making good camera phones, they have few camera apps which come handy.

Creative studio is one app where we can capture and edit photos .

Multitasking

The multi-tasking interface is the same as in WP7 - to switch between apps you press and hold the Back key. You'll get thumbnail snapshots of the apps, ordered chronologically left to right.

You can scroll the list horizontally to select an app and a tap will bring you back to your running or suspended app. You can't "kill" any of those apps from here - to exit one you must bring it to front and use the Back key to close it.

Telephony , messaging

The Nokia Lumia 920 offered loud and clear in-call sound and we had no issues with signal reception.

The phone application shows you the call history, with shortcuts to voice mail, dialer and phonebook. The phone live tile will show the number of missed calls as will the lock screen.

The dialer itself is as simple as it gets - a phone keypad with a Call and a Save button. 

The loudspeaker on the 920 is quite loud and has clear sounds with very less distortion even at highest volumes.

The Messaging department is excellent in Windows Phone. Threads are the building blocks of all non-email messaging. Although a sort of conversation view, threads mash together SMS, Facebook and Windows Live messages.

We've always loved windows phone keyboard with its ease of use and accurate auto correction. With 920's large display, typing on the phone is very easy and quite fun !

Camera

Lets start off with saying that this is easily the best cameraphone, period ! There is no match to its low light performance and awesome video recording capabilities.

The Lumia 920 has a 26mm wide-angle lens by Carl Zeiss and a dual-LED flash, it's the first one to feature true Optical Image Stabilization (OIS) instead of digital tricks that try (and fail most often than not) to achieve the same result.

The way it works is a gyroscope detects the motion of the phone and the whole optical assembly moves in the opposite direction to cancel out the movement (e.g. camera shake). That happens 500 times a second.

This has obvious advantages during video recording, but it also allows the Lumia 920 to use slower shutter speed in low-light conditions without fearing that camera shake will ruin the photos. That, combined with the f/2.0 aperture, leads to class-leading low-light performance. Keep in mind though that while the OIS works great for static scenes, moving objects in low-light scenes might still turn out blurry due to the slow shutter speed (motion blur).

Before the device actually launched, due to the poor marketing video people thought that the low light performance was a gimmick ! But, in realty it isn't. It is easily the best low light performer out there.

There is a settings option called, focus assist light which comes handy while taking pics in dark conditions which helps to focus on the subject. This can be turned off though !

Connectivity

The Nokia Lumia 920 has quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support, quad-band 3G with HSPA and 4G LTE connectivity (there are two versions of the phone with a different set of LTE bands).The local connectivity is covered by dual-band Wi-Fi a/b/g/n with DLNA, Wi-Fi Direct and hotspot, and stereo Bluetooth 3.1. Bluetooth is no longer limited as to what it can do - there's file transfer support now.

Unlike  windows phone 7, wp 8 need not rely on ZUNE to sync data to and fro from the device. Now. we have mass storage mode supported. You can throw in any file into the device and if there is an app that can handle that file, the phone will identify and open it.

Internet Explorer

The Internet Explorer on Widows Phone 8 got a major upgrade, but kept its old looks. Almost everything Microsoft has done on the IE is under the hood and the end result is close to excellent. The Lumia 920 has a big enough screen for comfortable browsing and the 332ppi pixel density keeps text sharp even at low zoom levels.

Apps Collection

This for most people can become the deciding factor to buy the phone ! 

Well we have a dual approach to it ! In a world  wide perspective, there are many apps missing such as instagram and popular titles such as temple run 2.

But the second approach is a question ! Instagram is used in India, although most indian users use it just to edit their pics and to save to the device. This can be achieved through many other third party apps in the windows phone store. People do not just decide on these two apps . The techworld thinks so though !

Windows phone is the fastest growing OS today and we would eventually see these apps making their way here !

Value for money

The Nokia Lumia 920 is priced at Rs 32,000/-  which we think is a bit too costly because at the same price we get Samsung's galaxy note 2 and iPhone 4s with a much more established platforms. If you do not care about the apps and all you need is great looks and quality, then this is it ! 

Conclusion

The Nokia flagship has a great screen, excellent design and impressive build quality.The Nokia Lumia 920 is certainly the best Windows Phone 8 smartphone on the market right now.