The IT Nerd

My latest review is the Nokia Lumia 620 Windows 8 smartphone courtesy of Telus who is the first carrier in North America to have this phone. The first thing that gets my attention is the feel of the phone. The phone feels nice in your hand and it is a good size and weight. Compared to my wife’s iPhone 5, it’s a tiny bit thinner, and a tiny bit shorter. It will fit into your coat or pants pocket easily. It also feels solidly constructed. You can pop off the the back and pop in a 64GB MicroSD card which will supplement the 8GB of internal memory. You can also replace the battery.

The phone is a HSPA phone that will go as fast as 21 Mbps. I couldn’t test that using Speedtest.net , but doesn’t feel slow. Pages using Internet Explorer rendered reasonably quickly. You also get 802.11 B/G/N WiFi to make sure that you don’t burn through too much cellular data. In terms of processing power, you’ve got a dual core 1Ghz Snapdragon processor running the show. There’s a 3.8” WVGA ClearBlack LCD (480 x 800) screen. It’s bright, clear and vibrant. Photos look nice on this screen. I found it to be good, but the iPhone 5 has a sharper screen. The one thing that I will point out is that the screen is glossy and while bright light such as the sun won’t wash out the screen, it could use an anti-glare coating to make it absolutely perfect. 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.

As for the built in apps, there are a number that come with the Lumia 620. Some of the ones that stand out are:

• Nokia Drive + Beta: This is a navigation app that offers voice based turn by turn navigation that speaks the names of the streets. The maps are resident on the phone and you can have as few or as many maps as you want on the phone. That means you won’t burn through cellular data constantly downloading maps in real time like you would with Apple Maps or Google Maps. Speaking of maps, there’s a separate maps application called Nokia Maps that also leverages these maps.
• Nokia Transit: This app helps you to navigate using public transit. It fetches public transit schedules to give you an idea of how long your journey will take. It is simple to use and even gets transit schedules to give you a reasonably accurate idea of how long your trip will take.
• Nokia City Lens: This 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. But I’m sure it can prove useful.

If all of this sounds familiar, it should. These are the same apps that came with the Nokia Lumia 920 that I reviewed a while ago. The difference is that in the case of Nokia Drive + Beta, it works better. That’s the beauty of being a beta product. You get constant improvements.

Also of note, it comes with the usual Windows 8 Phone apps such as Office, OneNote, Internet Explorer and Outlook. Also, if you’re an Angry Birds fan, there’s an app that allows you to easily buy the Angry Birds games and gives you access to all sorts of items related to the game. You can also set up your LinkedIn, FaceBook, and Twitter accounts on the phone and use an app called People so that you can keep tabs on your friends. If you prefer to use a separate app for Facebook or Twitter, you’ll have to take a trip to the Windows Marketplace to grab one.

So far, this phone looks like it’s very feature complete. So we’ll move on the camera. That will be in the next part of this review.

This entry was posted on March 11, 2013 at 10:38 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.