Nokia Lumia 920 review

The Lumia 920 is Nokia’s flagship Windows 8 Phone. It’s a chunky handset with a large 4.5in screen which has a huge 768×1,280 resolution. This makes it the highest-resolution screen we’ve seen, and it dwarfs the 480×800 pixels of the cheaper Lumia 820. It’s also the first 4G Nokia, so can take advantage of EE’s new high-speed 4G network.

The screen is an IPS model, and we were impressed with the quality. It’s significantly better than the display of the HTC 8X, with very high contrast and deep blacks, leading to some seriously vibrant colours. The extra horizontal pixels, compared to the 720 we normally see on high-end smartphones, are particularly useful when viewing web pages in landscape mode.

We loved the design of the previous Nokia Lumia 800, with its polycarbonate unibody, and the Lumia 920 is another corker. It’s a single piece of tough moulded plastic with a slightly convex screen, and looks fantastic. The phone will be available in black, yellow and red, and in white exclusively on EE – a nice change from the staid black and white options of most smartphones.

We quite fancy a yellow Lumia 920

Like the HTC 8X, the Lumia 920 is powered by a 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor, and is just as blazingly fast as HTC’s rival. We saw 906.9ms in the Sunspider JavaScript test, which makes this handset even quicker than our previous speed champion, the iPhone 5. Web browsing is as snappy as you’d expect. The phone managed a reasonable six hours and 56 minutes of video playback in our battery test, which is significantly better than the HTC 8X’s meagre five and a half hours.

Windows Phone 8 has some notable improvements over Windows Phone 7. You can now choose how large Live Tiles are, so you can allocate more space to those with interesting information to show, such as Photos, and shrink those that don’t need so much space, such as Messaging or Internet Explorer. There’s a new Kid’s corner mode, which lets you select exactly which apps, music, videos or games you want your kids to be able to use when they borrow your phone, while locking out the rest of the handset’s functions.

There’s also the new Rooms feature. This is an admirable attempt to make it easy to share content with a select group of people, if rather tricky to get your head around at first. If everyone you want to add to your Room has a Windows Phone 8 mobile, it’s easy enough; you just create a Room, select the person from your contacts you want to add and they are sent an invite to join. You can then share calendar appointments, photos and to-do lists with them from the Rooms app, and easily email all the members of the Room or start an instant messaging conversation.

Add people to a Room to make sharing content easy

You’ll still receive the emails if you have another kind of handset, but to see calendar appointments, shared photos and notes you’ll need to log in to Windows Live’s web services. Rooms also integrates rather well with Start Screen apps if you’re running Windows 8.

As Windows Phone 8 is so locked down, Nokia is aware that it has to work to differentiate its Windows Phone 8 handsets from the competition. For this reason the Lumia 920 comes with some useful Nokia-specific apps. The excellent Nokia Music is still there, letting you stream a selection of music mixes for free or download them to your phone for offline play later. Nokia City Lens is an augmented-reality city guide, which uses an overlay on the phone’s camera display to show you food and drink and entertainment in the area, while Nokia Drive gives you turn-by-turn navigation.

Nokia City Lens lets you explore the city, augmented reality-style

Maps has had a significant update, and now supports offline content. You can download maps of the entire world to the handset, or pick and choose by country and region, so you can use maps abroad without spending a fortune on data. There’s one caveat with Maps, though – the search function relies on a data connection, but if you’re determined not to go online you can always find locations manually by panning and zooming.

Nokia has made a big deal about the Lumia 920’s imaging capabilities. The phone’s 8.7-megapixel camera has a lens with optical image stabilisation; a first for a smartphone. We found it was extremely effective at eliminating camera shake while filming video; we could walk around with barely any swaying motion. We also used an electric vibrating table to really test the system, but the image remained rock steady. When we filmed using other smartphones on the same table, the image wobbled all over the place. The image stabilisation led to some of the best mobile video we’ve seen. 1080p footage from the camera was well-exposed and clear, even indoors, and was significantly better than the video from HTC’s Windows Phone 8X.

We were less impressed with the Lumia 920’s still images, though. While these were well-exposed, colours were dull and photos weren’t as sharp as we would like. There was also a large amount of noise reduction, but this led to a loss of detail. We much preferred the HTC Windows Phone 8X’s images which, while overexposed, were much more vibrant and pleasing to look at.

Exposures are accurate, but colours dull – click to enlarge

Zooming in shows some excessive noise reduction – click to enlarge

Nokia has included one feature to liven up your pictures, though; Cinemagraph. This app takes a photo, then analyses it for movement. It then lets you choose which parts of the image you want to leave moving, and lets you scrub the image with your finger to increase or decrease movement. The animation then plays back in a loop, animated GIF-style. We found it amusing to create GIFs of friends or colleagues chewing, for example. Nokia claims that Facebook is working on a way to support these animated photos.

The Lumia 920 is another beautifully-made Nokia handset. It has a great screen, is hugely fast and has some excellent Nokia-only apps to enhance Windows Phone 8. The only disappointment is the lacklustre camera, but the phone records superb video. The handset is expensive, especially on an EE 4G contract where it will cost you £41 a month, and limited app support means it’s still a big decision to jump to Windows Phone, but if you’re willing to take the plunge the Lumia 920 is the handset to dive into.