Nokia Lumia 920 Windows Phone 8 handset review If you ever go down the pub and let slip you’re a tech writer, you’re invariably asked for recommendations. With smartphones, this is pretty difficult these days because they’re all pretty good. No, scrap that, today’s devices are just amazing compared to what you could get a few years ago. They all do a job; you can’t really …
The question is not how good it is today. It is will Microsoft be supporting it in a year.
Good review, but I have no desire to own one. Too much screen real estate is occupied by oversized notification buttons. Save for the superior battery, the specs on this phone are almost identical to my current Android I bought 18 months ago. And that is still working a treat.
Okay, I'll bite. So your Android phone has:
Wireless charging (not the rubbish fiddly old style either)
Touchscreen you can use with gloves on (winter's coming...)
Free built-in satnav with offline maps, as many as you can fit on the phone if you like
Decent battery life
A 100% smooth OS (hint: it must be running iOS or WP)
Awesome camera (and 8.7MP, for those who care about that)
Best-in-class video recorder
332ppi, high contrast screen
Worldwide LTE
So basically you got one of the world's highest-specced phones, highest in some areas, 18 months ago? Who are you AC? And where is your time machine?
Or...maybe you're just trying to say you're happy with what your current phone does. That's good; next time say that.
fair point on the support front, though i suspect that they will. the way i see it, they felt that they had to make some fundemental changes, so in that respect it's better to do it early and fix it for the future, even though it burns some early adopters.
As for oversized buttons, i must point out that you can re-size them to the smallest size, which would give you 28 tiles in a 4*7 grid on the screen at any one time. add any more buttons you want underneath. I don't know if there is a limit on the number you can add.
That Stallone film you alluded to produced one of the wittiest responses to an interview question I ever heard. Genuinely amazing, as it was Stallone being interviewed:
"Mr Stallone, did you do any of your own stunts?"
"Hell no! I've been terrified of heights ever since my first marriage."
But a somewhat better camera is hardly a 'game changer'. An incremental update to a poorly selling handset, if you ask me. Ask anyone to spot the differences between a 900 and a 920; I hardly think anyone will be able to tell them apart. Which then begs the question: if the first one sold so poorly, what makes Nokia think this one will do any better?
Win Pho 8? Anecdotally, the only people I know who might be interested in a Lumia base it on their past experience with Nokia, not Microsoft.
However, that Nokia Transport thing is something I think Nokia could really use in order to claw back some market share in Europe, as a lot more Europeans travel on buses &c. Tie that in with other data containers, and you might have a winner.
ok I will bite...
920 has...
twice as many cores running at higher clock speed
bigger and better display IPS 768 x 1280 pixels, 4.5 inches (~332 ppi pixel density) vs 480 x 800 pixels, 4.3 inches (~217 ppi pixel density) AMOLED
2x as much RAM
2x as much storage (very welcomed)
2nd Generation Gorilla Glass
WP8
Wireless Charging
Dual Antenna
Bluetooth 3.1 vs Bluetooth 2.1
Better GPU
Full HD Video recording
Bigger battery giving upto 10h extra talk time and upto 100 hours extra standby time
Those are just a few of the differences - all of which are beneficial to the consumer in real terms instead of just being nice to have frills.
OK, about your points:
2x more RAM - all eaten by fulll blown NT kernel vs mobile-optimized OS (CE, iOS, Android, QNX/BBRY etc)
2x more storage - all eaten up by full blown NT install with 4 versions of .NET framework DLLs etc
WP8 - hardly a benefit
2nd Generation Gorilla Glass - who gives a fsck?
Bluetooth a.b vs Bluetooth c.d - see above
P.S. sir, you are an idiot
The display unit I saw looked nice and I'm sure it is a great phone but my problem with it, the S3 and even the iphone 5 is they're getting too big.
Do these companies not factor in that people put these things in their pocket or often use their phone with one hand, whether they're standing on the train or on the loo.
If I want something big, I'll get a tablet so make a phone that is optimised for single hand usage.
Curious what the bundled browser's like. Given that websites are now all optimised for Webkit browsers in Android & iPhone, does the WinPhone's IE work or is it buggy?
Can you download a WinPhone emulator a-la Android & iPhone?
Just a web developer wondering if Microsoft have learned from their past mistakes.
The browser is actually really good. Fast and responsive from a users point of view but as a fellow web developer, I've had no issues at all with it.
It manages to render old sites really well but for all the HTML5/CSS3/JQuery (and other scripting libs) sites I've done, there have been no problems at all. All sites I now do are built with responsive design very much in mind and again, no problems here!
"Come to mention it – how did anyone get around a city before 2009?"
Well, same as we now in 2012. Because the feature you're hinting at, Local Scout, is still not supported in all countries. You guys are lucky because in the bigger countries such as England and Germany Local Scout has been fully implemented.
Yet in a dozen other countries; Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain it simply doesn't work. Of course some application developers jumped right in the gap and created apps to cover for all this. But the fact remains that several years after Windows Phone has been released many of its features are still not fully supported.
Local scout is one, what to think about speech dictation? Or having the option to search for pictures or sounds? Bing maps? Its nice that it comes with a "find directions" function, it becomes a little useless because you have to actually tap the screen to tell the phone that it should show you the next waypoint.
So quite frankly; yes, a new phone is kind of impressive. But being a WP7.5 users myself I'd be more impressed if Microsoft would also have made some improvements to the availability of their phone services.
If you buy yourself a Winphone 8 you're also buying into something which provides many unsupported features if you happen to live in 'other' countries. That really doesn't sound very impressive to me.
It looks like a decent phone, WP8 looks like an interesting OS. I really think they've blown it though, unfortunately. The fact that I can't walk into any phone shop and get one, or go on the website of any operator and order one is the big issue.
I'm not clear if I can get one on contract without going on 4G, I looked briefly and couldn't see anything to indicate I could - although this is not definitive research - and this is/would be a deal breaker for me. I don't want 4G. I want a decent 3G connection with unlimited data. I'm not prepared to pay stupid amounts for a connection faster than I need and a data cap lower than I need. (Interestingly, the reviewer used an unlocked handset on 3 and reports good battery life: I wonder what the EE supplied 4G handsets are like with the battery).
So I'm getting the Nexus 4. True, I'm not going to be able to get it from where I normally would, and the lack of SD card slot on it is a failing (as it is on the Lumia 920). But it's an impressive bit of kit and it's cheap which brings us to the biggest problem for Nokia: the competition is strong. The iPhone 5, the S3 and the Note 2, the HTC windows phones and the Nexus 4 and countless others. We're spoilt for choice at the minute and can get most of them on almost any operator/plan we choose. This phone looks good, but not good enough to bring anyone but the most loyal Nokia/Windows Phone fan off of the network that they prefer, when those networks can provide such a wide range of equally good phones.
I would really like to see this succeed: more competition is better for us (the customers). Unless it becomes more widely available in the new year and gets some good marketing, I don't think it's going to.
The 10 people interested in the Lumia 920, are making the same sounds at the 12 people that were interested in the Lumia 900, and look how that turned out for them.
They have long since gone an bought proper smartphones safe in the knowledge they won't get dumped on from a great height and left for dead with an extinct OS app format...
When Apple provide an upgrade to an older handset it is often missing features and dreadfully slow and get lots of angry users moaning.
When Apple don't provide an upgrade they get loads of angry users moaning.
Personally I'd sooner know in advance the support period so as to plan what contract to go on and when to get ready for an upgrade.
"Personally I'd sooner know in advance the support period so as to plan what contract to go on and when to get ready for an upgrade."
You mean like,
1) Nokia 'releases' Lumia 900 in May 2012
2) device is actually in stores on June 2012
3) Microsoft declares NO WP8 upgrades for these Lumia 900's in July 2012
That's definitely the way to keep punters happy.
"The 10 people interested in the Lumia 920, are making the same sounds at the 12 people that were interested in the Lumia 900, and look how that turned out for them."
Extraordinary that at the time of posting, it seems six of the those ten people have already downvoted you. What are the chances that so many of the nation's ten people interested in this phone would be El Reg readers and present on this story?
First they tie themselves to a new Microsoft o/s that very few people have high hopes for and so which will minimise the addressable market even if the phone is great.
Then they sign an extremely restrictive exclusivity deal with the people in the UK who want you to pay through the nose for a new network that few people want or need.
If this is their plan for recovering mass market appeal and turning themselves around then I wouldnt fancy owning shares.
Why don't they refuse to sell a handset to anyone whose name doesn't begin with V to give it a sense of exclusivity?
If those photos are representative of the best available camera in a phone, I weep. The photos (even the daylight ones) are blurry, pixelated and just plain weird. The leaves in the photo of the rock, for example, look like they're viewed through gauze. The sample video has the drunken, floaty image stabilisation thing going on.
Perhaps they were bad jpg compression for the article and YouTube stabilisation, but I doubt it.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
