Hey guys, this is Austin and today I’m here with a review of the Nokia Lumia
920.
With Windows Phone 8, a unique build and one of the best smartphone
cameras out there let’s take a look.
Pop open the box and inside you’ll see the phone itself and a tool to eject your
MicroSIM.
Dig a little deeper and you’ll find an NFC demo tag, extremely boring
safety info, a quick start guide and a little smart setup guide.
Lastly you’ll find a MicroUSB cable for charging
and syncing along with a USB wall adapter to juice the phone up.
It won’t take you long to see the Lumia sticks out from
other smartphones in a big way.
Decked out in a glossy yellow finish there’s no doubt it’s unique and I’m a big
fan of how it looks.
Of course if you want something a bit more tame it’s
available in other much more boring colors including black.
The Lumia is also a very big phone at 10.7mm thick and weighing
in at almost 50% more than the Galaxy S3.
The overall size is quite large as well with a footprint roughly on
par with the Nexus 4 but with a smaller screen.
All of that said, I actually really didn’t mind the added heft as it
reminded me of the old indestructible Nokias with excellent build quality.
The body is a single piece of polycarbonate, aka plastic and as it’s colored
all the way through you don’t have to worry about scratches removing the
finish.
Up front you’ll find the 1.3 megapixel front facing camera which is capable
of 720p video and your speaker grille and below are the capacitive
back, Windows and Search keys.
For some reason the screen and buttons are offset quite a bit from the
bottom of the phone, making the entire front appear off center.
Up top is the headphone jack and MicroSIM slot and on the
right side is the volume rocker, sleep button and the dedicated camera key
which is nice to see.
On bottom is your MicroUSB port for charging and syncing
along with the very impressive speaker.
This is by far one of the loudest speakers I’ve heard on a phone in
quite a while, delivering enough volume to fill a decently sized room with
music.
Finally on back you’ll see the 8.7 megapixel camera and LED flash
which I’ll get into in a minute.
It's also compatible with the Qi wireless charging standard and AT&T is bundling a free
wireless charger with the Lumia right now.
The screen is a 4.5 inch IPS panel with a resolution of 1280x768
making it slightly wider than normal 720p phones and a huge step up from
older Windows Phones.
It is a bit smaller than the 4.7 and 5 inch screens on
most smartphones today but you aren’t losing out on too much and it makes
up for it with 332 pixels per inch.
The display itself is very nice with good black levels and decent saturation, both of
which are important with the Live Tiles on Windows Phone.
The star of the show here is definitely Windows Phone 8.
Just like the Lumia itself it's a very different experience than your
average smartphone and it's easily one of the sleekest and smoothest UIs out
there.
The home screen is all about Live Tiles which do double duty as app
icons and an at a glance bit of info for example a missed call or a new Tweet.
You can also resize the tiles and rearrange them as much as you'd like.
Just like Windows 8 you can customize the color
of the entire OS but beyond that what you see is basically what you get, this
is definitely not a phone for people who really like to customize.
As a Windows Phone you'll find integration with SkyDrive, Office and Xbox
Live.
Office is included and is decent for viewing or editing a Word or Excel
doc on the go but not much more than that.
Gaming was originally supposed to be a strong suit of Windows
Phones as you can connect your Xbox Live gamertag and get
Achievements from mobile games but the selection is lacking.
You'll find a few games like Angry Birds and Final Fantasy
but overall there really isn't much in the Store right now.
App support is a little better.
You can find an app to do most things but a lot of what you'll
find is really lacking in quality.
The Google app isn't bad if you want to avoid
using Bing but it hasn't been updated in nearly eight months.
The Twitter app is just terrible with constant crashes however and the list goes on.
That's not to say some apps aren't great, amazingly enough Internet Explorer really
isn't bad.
Just like the rest of Windows Phone it's buttery smooth most of
the time and is one of the fastest mobile browsers out there.
SunSpider is a great example of this, it notches a
score which is able to clear the iPhone 5 and Nexus 4.
You'll run into occasional issues with fonts not rendering
properly but overall it's a really nice browser.
I don't want to give the wrong impression here, Windows
Phone 8 is a major step forward and in some ways surpasses both iOS and
Android.
The big issue is the lack of apps which hopefully will improve now
that Windows Phone and Windows 8 share a lot of DNA but right now it's far
behind its main rivals.
The camera on the other hand is the best you’ll find on
a modern smartphone period.
With 8.7 megapixels and an LED flash to work with it might not seem too great on paper
but it has one major advantage: optical image stabilization.
With tiny springs inside the lens to keep it steady
this allows the Lumia to deliver spectacular low light performance.
Comparing it to the iPhone 5 and Nexus 4 you can see
there’s really no contest, it pulls in images better than some point and shoots.
In normal daylight the images are quite nice as well although not a huge improvement
over ordinary smartphones.
That optical image stabilization makes a big difference for
video.
So I’m walking around on some pretty uneven ground here and yet the
camera keeps it nice and smooth, as in fact I’ll go ahead and bring it down
here for you guys.
You can see that 1080p video looks really nice on the Lumia
920.
Inside you’ll find the Lumia 920 is powered by a 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4
dual core processor and 1GB of RAM.
Windows Phone has always been fast and this does a great job of making sure the
phone stays incredibly smooth.
The Snapdragon S4 is starting to show it’s age as the S4 Pro has been released
but it’s still an entirely competent performer.
Impressively the phone includes 32GB of storage which is generous
considering the price.
Call quality is quite good on the AT&T network and with
LTE on board if you have it in your area you can expect impressive speeds.
Unfortunately it hasn’t rolled out here yet so I did my testing on HSPA+
which can still give you reasonable speeds above 5Mbps.
Battery life was good enough in my testing, delivering
enough juice to make it through a day of moderate use thanks to the
2000mAh battery.
The Nokia Lumia 920 is easily one of the most unique
phones out there, definitely in a good way.
It looks and feels like nothing else and Windows Phone 8 finally delivers modern
specs including a dual core processor and HD screen.
It’s incredibly smooth and the camera is stellar but
app support is severely lacking and it is a big, heavy phone.
It’s not going to be for everyone but for only $99 you could
do much, much worse than the Lumia 920.
You can check out more reviews of high end phones here and if
you enjoyed be sure to hit up that Like button and subscribe for more!
Anyway guys I’ll catch you in the next one!