Nokia Lumia 920
What's hot: Fast, beautiful, excellent display, great camera.
What's not: Windows Phone app selection lags behind the more established competition from iOS and Android.
 Reviewed November 17, 2012 by Lisa Gade, Editor in Chief (twitter: @lisagade)
The Nokia Lumia 920 is undeniably the
shining star for the Windows Phone 8 launch. The phone is available in a
variety of vibrant colors along with the more staid black and white
options. For those who like a splash of color there's Nokia's signature
cyan, yellow and red. Much like the very attractive Lumia 900,
it has an iconic unibody polycarbonate design, Nokia exclusive apps
that are truly useful and enjoyable and a surprisingly low $99 with
contract price on AT&T ($449 without). That really puts the hurt on
the Windows Phone 8 HTC 8X that sells for $199 in its 16 gig iteration on AT&T.
       
The HTC 8X and Nokia Lumia 920.
The Lumia 920 has top of the line
hardware, unlike the Lumia 900 that felt dated at launch because it was
hobbled by Windows Phone 7's low-ball hardware requirements. Windows
Phone 8 moves to modern hardware and everything about the Lumia 920 is
competitive with high end Android smartphones. It runs on a dual core
1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Krait CPU with a gig of RAM and 32 gigs of
storage. It has an excellent rear 8.7 MP camera with a Carl Zeiss lens
and backside illuminated sensor that excels at low light photography.
There's a front camera that you can use with the preview version of
Skype for Windows Phone 8 that Microsoft added to the app store a few
days after the 920's US launch. AT&T has a 6 month exclusive on the
Lumia 920 in the US, so you'll either have to go with AT&T or use
the unlocked version on T-Mobile (sorry Sprint and Verizon customers,
the GSM Lumia 920 won't work on your networks).
The phone has dual band WiFi
802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0, a solid GPS and NFC. It supports wireless
charging and early adopters will get a free wireless charging mat
according to AT&T and Nokia (it sells for $50 otherwise).
PureMotion HD+ Display
The 4.5" IPS display runs at 1280 x 768
resolution, making it extremely competitive with the top Android phones
and iPhones with Retina display. The Nokia actually slightly edges past
the iPhone 5
for pixel density by 6 ppi (332 vs. 326) and is significantly ahead of
most big screen Android phones in terms of pixel density. Of course,
you get a significantly larger display with the Lumia 920 vs. the iPhone
5, and one that's big enough to compete with today's giant 4.7 to 4.8
inch Android smartphones. The wrap-around Gorilla Glass is attractive,
though it does induce glare, but thanks to polarizing filters and a very
impressive 600 nits of max brightness, it's easily viewable outdoors.
That's not the end of the Lumia display feature list: it's a super
sensitive capacitive display that works with fingernails (in my tests
this might take more than one tap if you have very long nails) and even
gloves. Leave it to the folks from chilly Finland at Nokia to manage
that feat! The LCD has a 60Hz refresh rate and deep, rich blacks. Colors
are vibrant and it's a sheer pleasure to watch video and view photos.
Though quite saturated, colors are more balanced and natural compared to
AMOLED and Super AMOLED displays. Good going, Nokia. The bright, high
contrast and saturated display make the HT 8X look a little bit dull in
comparison.
 |
Nokia Lumia 920 Video Review
* (please note that in the video review I
misstate that the iPhone 5 has higher pixel density, the Lumia is
actually 6ppi higher).
|
Design and Ergonomics
If you've seen the Lumia 900 or even the
Lumia 800, you have a good idea of what the Lumia 920 looks and feels
like. The Lumia 920 is thicker than the Lumia 900 in the middle and some
colors are gloss, but the overall design language is the same. The
Lumia 920 is heavy for a 4.5" smartphone: it weighs 6.5 ounces, which is
considerably heavier than the big 5.5" Samsung Galaxy Note II (granted
Samsung makes uncannily light phones) and every other current smartphone
on the market. It's similar in size to the 4.8" Samsung Galaxy S III,
so it's by no means a small footprint phone. That said, the curves are
all in the right places and it feels good in hand. It's not wider than
other current smartphones so it's no more of a pain to use one-handed
than its competitors.
The matte finish black and cyan look
cool in their polycarbonate glory. The gloss colors don't look in the
least cheap: rather the bright colors and high gloss hardened surface
remind us more of a high quality auto finish (it helps when you have a
yellow that's reminiscent of Lamborghini and a red that's just a tad
cooler than Ferrari red). I admit I like bold colors and the yellow and
red Lumia 920s on my desk never fail to make me smile.
The buttons aren't just mindless chrome,
rather they have a tasteful ceramic finish that plays off the dark
glass that wraps around the sides. The side volume, power and camera
buttons are easy to operate but stiff enough that we didn't press them
by accident. The micro USB port for syncing and charging is located on
the bottom, as are the small stereo speakers. The 3.5mm audio jack and
micro SIM card tray are up top. The top and bottom edges are straight to
improve grip, while the sides are curved for comfort.
The phone supports Qi wireless
charging with Nokia's own charging mat or others that use the Qi
standard (our Energizer mat worked fine). That means you don't have to
buy an alternate charging back or sleeve to use wireless charging. This
is a unibody design so you in fact can't remove the back or access the
battery that's sealed inside. There's no microSD card slot, but happily
the phone has an ample 32 gigs of storage.
Windows Phone 8 and Nokia Software
Windows Phone has always been fast, even
on slow hardware. Windows Phone 8 on the Nokia Lumia 920 flies, and
I've yet to find myself waiting for the phone. Live Tiles are now
resizable and as always, you can uninstall carrier bloatware: bye, bye
Yellow Pages Mobile! Kid's Corner lets you select the apps, videos and
websites that kids (or anyone else) using your phone has access to
(think of it as family-focused login accounts).
For those of you who haven't tried
Windows Phone yet, it's a cross between the customizability of Android
and the easy intuitiveness of iOS. That's not to say it copies either,
because it doesn't. This is a unique user interface that's now made its
way to the Modern UI with Live Tiles in Windows 8 for tablets, laptops
and desktop computers. It's closer to iOS in terms of UI and security:
it's a very consistent user interface that's quite easy to learn, and
security is a priority along with locked down access to apps from
Microsoft's official store for apps. You can choose which Live Tiles
appear on your Start (home) screen and set their size. You can remove
apps including carrier-installed apps that you don't want. Some Live
Tiles provide updates and notifications (number of emails unread, next
appointments, current weather) unless you set them to the smallest
possible size where updates may no longer fit depending on the Tile.
Typography is key and fonts look sharp and finely tuned, and the
side-swiping UI in apps is fun and easy to use. Android folks, you won't
be able to load custom ROMs or install apps from untrusted sources and
there are no widgets here; Live Tiles that update with snippets of info
are the closest you'll get.
Nokia's Windows Phone apps remain a
strong selling point with Nokia Maps and Nokia Drive Beta offering the
option to download maps for offline use and get spoken turn by turn
spoken directions (Bing Maps provides on-screen directions but not
spoken directions). There's Nokia Transit for those who need mass
transit directions too. If you don't get a Nokia Windows Phone, your
alternatives are the carrier supplied apps like AT&T Navigator
(often with a monthly fee) or TeleNav's Scout (also requires a fee).
Nokia Music has a cool "mix radio"
feature where you can stream playlists in a wide variety of genres for
free. You can even download playlist tunes for offline listening and
refresh them as you see fit. This makes for a nice Pandora substitute.
Nokia City Lens is also preinstalled for you augmented reality fans and
I've found it surprisingly useful and informative though a little creepy
when used in residential areas where you'll find out about all sorts of
home-based businesses.
The usual excellent Microsoft music
player is on board (formerly called Zune Music and now called XBOX
Music). You can load your own music from your iTunes library on Mac and
Windows machines via the included USB cable, or mount the smartphone as a
mass storage drive in Windows and drag and drop music, videos and
documents onto the phone. Mass storage is a new feature in Windows Phone
8, and Mac support has been around since Windows Phone 7 via the free
Windows Phone app in the Mac app store. The phone has Dolby headphone
software with EQ and sound out through headphones is excellent: no
distortion with clear trebles and full bass.
Similarly, Microsoft's video player can
play locally stored video (MPEG4 and WMV formats, including non-DRM
content from your iTunes library) though it doesn't yet offer access to
rentals and purchases from the XBOX video store. The phone can handle
1080p MPEG4 video playback, though that exceeds screen resolution so you
might as well stick with 720p.
For those who are XBOX users, there's
account integration and you'll see your avatar friends and achievements
and there's a free downloadable XBOX SmartGlass app you can use to
interact with and control your XBOX. Games hub is where you'll find
downloaded games (some XBOX branded and various not branded). The games
are overall high quality and sell for .99 to 9.99 with most solid newer
titles costing 4.99 to 6.99. That said, you won't see the huge selection
of games that you will on the iPhone yet, nor even the same titles that
have crossed over from iOS to Android. There are a few Need for Speed
titles, a mobile version of SIMS 3, Assassin's Creed, Sonic 4, various
Angry Birds titles and quite a few casual games that are fun. What's not
here? Shadowgun, Dead Trigger and Modern Combat 3.
Windows Phone 8 has basic voice commands
to launch apps and enter text for things like search that's on par with
Android but lacks all the natural language query goodness of Siri on
the iPhone. Bing is your default search engine (surprise) and we found
Bing's results to be very useful, especially for local search and the
excellent Local Scout app. You can download Google's Search Live Tile,
but there's no Google Maps app for Windows Phone. We're OK with that
because Nokia Maps plus Microsoft's Local Scout picks up the slack just
fine with none of Apple Maps' quirkiness.
The email client supports most email
types including Exchange, Gmail, POP3 and IMAP. I set up the phone to
sync my Gmail, Google Contacts and Calendar using the push setting (IMAP
push) and the phone updated as quickly as my Android devices with new
email and synced calendar items.
This is a Microsoft product so you get
the mobile version of MS Office that works with Word, Excel, OneNote and
PowerPoint files (you can view but not create PowerPoint files). Since
it's a mobile version you won't find all the features of desktop MS
Office, but the basics are here. The phone works with locally stored
files, email attachments and documents on your Skydrive or Office 365
share.
Calling and Internet
Nokia phones have always offered top
notch call quality and the Lumia 920 has very good call quality with
full and clear voice on both ends. It doesn't beat the also excellent
Samsung Galaxy S III and iPhone 5, but it meets and equals them with a
tiny bit less clarity on the high trebles than the GS III. Still, it's
one of the better voice phones on the market. The phone played nicely
with a variety of Bluetooth headsets and headphones, as we've come to
expect from Nokia, but we did notice it wasn't compatible with our Apple
EarPods (we heard a high pitched whine). Stereo headphones worked fine,
so it seems there's an issue with the mic pickup in the earbuds.
Data speeds were very good over
AT&T's 4G LTE network. Though the popular cross-platform
Speedtest.net app isn't available yet for Windows Phone, we used a
variety of other test apps on the Windows market for speed tests and saw
good speeds. Likewise, app downloads, video downloads and web page
downloads were as fast as we've seen on competing AT&T LTE
smartphones. The Lumia 920 has the mobile hotspot feature so you can use
the phone as a wireless hotspot for your tablet, laptop or other
device. The phone uses a micro SIM card.
Performance and Horsepower
While Windows Phone 7 smartphones were
mired in the past thanks to dated Microsoft hardware requirements,
Windows Phone 8 calls for modern dual core processors, various allowable
display resolutions and more RAM. Not that Windows Phone 7 lacked for
quickness, but specs do count for marketing purposes and faster hardware
allows for more advanced features and impressive games. The Nokia Lumia
920 has a gig of RAM and 32 gigs of storage (currently most competing
WP8 smartphones have 8-16 gigs of storage). There's no microSD card
slot, and those used to cause problems because of Windows Phone 7's card
encryption scheme so we only saw a card slot on the Samsung Focus,
where it caused problems due to card compatibility and encryption
issues. Windows Phone 8 handles microSD cards more elegantly, but so far
we've only seen the card slot on the Nokia Lumia 810/820/822 Windows 8
phone that has just 8 gigs of internal storage. That said, 32 gigs is a
healthy amount of internal storage that can house lots of apps, a decent
music collection and some feature length movies.
The 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 dual core Krait CPU is the same you'll find in high end Android phones like the Samsung Galaxy S III and HTC One X.
Granted, a few quad core Snapdragon CPUs are hitting the market now (LG
Optimus G and Nexus 4), but the dual core is still mighty powerful and
more than adequate to keep the Lumia 920 moving along extremely quickly.
It does very well in cross platform benchmarks like AnTuTu and
Sunspider.
Benchmarks
| AnTuTu | Sunspider JavaScript Test | |
| Nokia Lumia 920 | 11,904 | 911 |
| iPhone 5 | N/A | 935 |
| LG Optimus G | 11,087 | 1289 |
| Motorola Atrix HD | 6123 | 1314 |
| HTC One X | 7074 | 1617 |
| Samsung Galaxy S III | 7011 | 1825 |
Nokia PureView Camera
The rear 8.7MP camera is excellent,
though in our tests it hasn't completely trounced the top competition
from Samsung and Apple. It does however edge ahead in low light and
night situations. Photos are sharp and clear but not over-sharpened and
color saturation is pleasing though we noted the same tendency for reds
to bloom that we saw in the Lumia 900. 1080p video has very good frame
rates, even in low light and does beat out the competition unless we're
talking about the 41MP Nokia PureView.
Overall, photos are natural and rich
looking, and you'd be hard pressed to tell them apart from a point and
shoot camera. Tweaking the default photo settings and adding a little
sharpening in post processing yields some very fine photos. 1080p video
isn't the least bit blocky and has great color and detail. This is
definitely a nice camera to shoot with and it's good enough for print
photos and YouTube video uploads. If you wish, the phone can save your
photos and videos to your Skydrive cloud storage (7 gigs of storage are
included). These will automatically appear in your Photos app on a
Windows 8 PC if you use the same Windows Live login on both computer and
phone. You can share these with others if you like, but the default
keeps them safely private for your eyes only.
The rear camera has an impressive
feature list including a backside illuminated sensor, fat f/2.0 26mm
Carl Zeiss lens with dual LED flash and optical image stabilization. The
front f/2.4 1.2MP camera does 720p video for sharp video chat.
Battery Life
The Nokia Lumia 920 has a 2,000 mAh
Lithium Ion polymer battery that's sealed inside (like the iPhone and
HTC One X, you can't swap in a spare). We had no trouble making it
through the day on a charge with moderate use, and it lasted as long as
my Galaxy S III. Some users have reported short runtimes, but I haven't
encountered that problem with our two Lumia 920 units. The phone does
support more robust multi-tasking than Windows Phone 7.5, so if you do
have battery issues, reboot the phone to see if that clears up
background apps that might be hogging cycles. Also use the back button
to exit out of games and Nokia Drive rather than the home button (the
one with the Windows logo).
The Lumia 920 has wireless charging
built in using the Qi standard. Nokia's charging matte sells for $50 or
you can use other brand charging mattes that use Qi.
Pet Peeves
Monolithic volume control, really?
There's one volume setting and that means when you turn down you video
player's volume, your ringtone volume is also diminished. If you forget
to turn it back up after the video is done, you might not hear your
phone ring. And no search in the calendar application? Please Microsoft,
fix this!
Conclusion
The Nokia Lumia 920 is undeniably the
hero phone for Windows Phone 8's launch. It has an elegant and memorable
design that feels great in hand and looks classy. The superb 4.5" IPS
display has rich colors, excellent contrast and it works with gloves.
Though text doesn't look quite as painted on as it does on the HTC One
X, HTC Droid DNA and iPhone 5 the display's extremely high pixel density
and sharpness make for an excellent experience. The phone is very fast
and stable, and it has plenty of internal storage. I've been using it
for a week as my main phone and have put my Samsung Galaxy S III in the
drawer: surprisingly, I haven't missed my S III all that much, even
though I've been a heavy Android user for years (with trysts with
various Windows Phones and iPhones thrown in over the years). My only
caveats? The phone is quite heavy for its size and the app selection is
healthy with many of the big players present, but it still can't match
the iPhone and Android (yet). The only thing holding the Lumia 920 back
from our Editor's Choice award is app selection. Hopefully in another
year we'll see a bloom of Windows Phone apps, that will no longer be an
issue.
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