Nokia Lumia 720 review

There are now five phones in Nokia’s Windows Phone 8 Lumia range. Nokia claims the plan is to give the core Nokia Windows Phone 8 experience to everyone regardless of which phone they buy, but you’ll still get a gradually higher specification as you move up the range.

This is why even the base Nokia Lumia 520 has fancy extras such as free music from Nokia Music and high-quality offline mapping from HERE maps, but faster processors, better screens and cameras await you with more expensive models.

The Lumia 720 sits in the middle of the price band-filling bonanza. It’s around £80 more expensive SIM-free than the Lumia 620 and around £80 less than the Lumia 820. We find the Lumia 620 to be the current sweet spot in the Lumia range, so we were interested to see whether the Lumia 720 is worth the extra cash.

We’re beginning to sound like a broken record, but the Lumia 720 is another well-made and good-looking Nokia handset. It’s very similar to the Lumia 820, but is a unibody design rather than having a pop-off rear cover. The Lumia 720 isn’t as shiny as the 820 – it has a matt cover like the 520 and 620, which feels hard-wearing. The 720’s screen is slightly curved at the edges and blends into the phone’s curved sides, which gives it a smart edge-to-edge look – something which missing from the Lumia 620, with its conventional plastic screen surround.

Inside, the Lumia 720 is similar to its cheaper sibling. Both the 620 and 720 have dual-core 1GHz processors and 512MB RAM, and this seems more than enough to run Windows Phone 8 smoothly. The phone completed the Sunspider JavaScript benchmark in 1,441ms, which is comparable to a mid-to-high-end Android smartphone. The handset could render the BBC News website in nine seconds, which is reasonable if not up there with the fastest handsets such as the Motorola RAZR i, which can put the graphics-heavy page together in three seconds over a fast Wi-Fi connection.

The handset has a 4.3in 800×480 display, and this is one area where you can see where the extra money over the Lumia 620 goes. It’s an IPS model rather than the standard TN of the Lumia 620’s screen, and we found it displayed more accurate colours. While whites on the Lumia 620 had a definite reddish tinge, on the Lumia 720 they were a much purer shade.

You can use the Lumia 620’s screen with your fingernail or when wearing gloves, but the Lumia 720’s is even more sensitive – the slightest touch with your nail or through cloth will let you navigate the operating system.

The screen’s larger size leads to a larger, if slimmer, handset overall, but the extra bulk does leave room for a larger battery; the Lumia 720 has a 2,000mAh model compared to the small 1,300mAh pack in the 620. This makes a big difference to battery life. In our continuous video playback test the Lumia 720 managed 9h 17m, which is three hours more than the 620 managed.

The Lumia 720’s camera is a 6.7-megapixel model with an f/1.9 lens compared to the Lumia 620’s 5-megapixel sensor and f/2.4 combination. In daylight conditions we struggled to find much difference between the Lumia 620 and 720’s shots; both showed plenty of detail and accurate exposure and colours. Both phones’ shots were also a match for those of the Samsung Galaxy S3, which has one of our favourite cameras.

Fantastic outdoor shots from the Lumia 720’s 6.7-megapixel camera – click to enlarge

We saw more difference in our indoor shots. In low light, with the main lights off and just a couple of sidelights for illumination, the Lumia 720’s larger aperture helped it produce brighter pictures with more detail in dark areas – these dark areas were still fairly noisy, however. It was under these conditions that the Galaxy S3 pulled ahead, showing less noise and more detail than either of the Nokia phones in poor light.

The Lumia 720’s larger camera aperture meant it could pick up more detail in darker areas than the Lumia 620 (below) – click to enlarge

The Lumia 720 is a tricky phone to rate. It’s significantly cheaper than the Lumia 820, and you’re unlikely to notice its performance deficit in everyday use, so it feels better value. It has some stiff competition from the excellent Lumia 620, though. The 720 has a slightly better screen and camera, but there’s not a great deal in it. It has much better battery life, so if you want definite all-day use without charging it’s a better choice, but we still think the Nokia Lumia 620 is the best-value phone in Nokia’s range.