The IT Nerd

The Nokia Lumia 920 is one of many phones running Microsoft’s phone OS that Rogers is promoting as of late. I was lucky enough to get my hands on one for a brief test and I came away more impressed than the last Windows phone that I tested which was the HTC 8X Windows 8 Phone.

The first thing that I have to say is that this is a big, thick and heavy phone. Okay, it’s no Samsung Galaxy Note or S3 in terms of size, but it’s bigger than the iPhone. Small hands might have a problem holding this phone. As for the weight, it’s heavier than the iPhone by a fair margin. My wife commented that she’d hate carrying it in her purse. Having said that, it is a well put together phone. It feels solid and well constructed.

The Lumia 920’s HD screen has a 1,280×768-pixel resolution. It’s bright and clear and colours look vivid. Photos and videos look stunning on this screen. It’s also viewable in all conditions such as bright light, outdoors, etc. The quality of the sound is pretty good as the phone has an equalizer and Dolby based boosting, but only if you use a headset.

For those of you who want to use your phone to navigate their way through life, you’re in luck. This phone comes with several apps to choose from. There’s Nokia Drive + which is a navigation app that offers voice based turn by turn navigation. It works well enough, but the voice prompts simply tell you to turn left or turn right. It doesn’t name street names. That forces you to look at the phone rather than focus on driving. Perhaps this will improve as this application does have the word “beta” all over it. One advantage that this app has over Apple Maps is that the maps are resident on the phone and you can have as few or as many maps as you want on the phone. Next up is Nokia Transit which helps you to navigate from place to place using public transit. It fetches public transit schedules to give you an idea of how long your journey will take. I have no idea if this accounts for delays on the subway and the like, but it is simple to use. Then there’s Nokia City Lens which is an augmented-reality app. Hold up the phone in landscape mode to see nearby businesses, landmarks, and happenings. I’m not sure how accurate this info is as it highlighted stores and restaurants that don’t exist anymore. Nor did it show some stores that I was standing right in front of. #Fail.

As for the hardware specs, it comes with 32GB of non-expandable RAM. It is also an LTE phone and though I wasn’t able to use Speedtest.net to test the phone, but it does have a max speed of 75 Mbps. It did feel fast when I was testing it for what that’s worth. It also has 802.11 N connectivity as well so you can save some dollars in terms of your phone bill. One thing that I did not get a chance to test is the wireless charging feature. This phone doesn’t need a wire to charge as you can use a compatible charging pad to charge the phone. It sounds neat. I wonder how well it works in practise?

In the next part of the review, I’ll cover the picture and video features of the phone. It comes with a Carl Zeiss lens which means by reputation alone, it should be amazing. We’ll see.

This entry was posted on January 14, 2013 at 9:27 am and is filed under Products with tags Nokia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.