Nokia Lumia 920

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.