Gadgetory

hey guys this is Austin and today I'm here with a review of the Nokia Lumia 920 with Windows Phone 8 a unique build and one of the best smartphone cameras out there let's take a look pop open the box and inside you'll see the phone itself and a tool to eject your micro SIM dig a little deeper and you'll find an NFC demo tag extremely boring safety info a Quick Start Guide and a little smart set-up guide lastly you'll find a micro USB cable for charging and syncing along with the USB wall adapter to juice the phone up it won't take you long to see the Lumia sticks out from other smartphones in a big way take down a glossy yellow finish there's no doubt its unique and I'm a big fan of how it looks of course if you want something a bit more tame it's available on other much more boring colors including black the Lumia is also a very big phone at ten point seven millimeters thick and weighing in at almost 50% more than the galaxy s3 the overall size is quite large as well with a footprint roughly on par with the Nexus 4 but with a smaller screen all that said I actually really didn't mind the added heft is it reminded me of the old indestructible Nokia's with excellent build quality the body is a single piece of polycarbonate aka plastic and as its coloured all the way through you don't have to worry about scratches removing the finish up front you'll find the 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera which is capable of 720p video and your speaker grille and below or the capacitive back windows and search keys for some reason the screen and buttons are offset quite a bit from the bottom of the phone making the entire front appear off-center up top is the headphone jack and micro SIM slot and on the right side is the volume rocker sleep button in the dedicated camera key which is nice to see on bottom is your micro USB port for charging and syncing along with the very impressive speaker this is by far one as a lot of speakers I've heard on a phone in quite a while delivering enough volume to fill a decently sized room with music finally on back you'll see the 8.7 megapixel camera and LED flash which I'll get into in a minute it's also compatible with the Qi wireless charging standard and 18t is bundling a free wireless charger with the Lumia right now the screen is a 4.5 inch IPS panel with a resolution of 1280 by 768 making it slightly wider than normal 720p phones and a huge step up from older windows phones it is a bit smaller than the 4.7 and 5 inch screens on most smartphones today but you aren't losing out on too much and it makes up for it with 332 pixels per inch the display itself is very nice with good black levels and decent saturation both of which are important with the live tiles on when phone the start of the show here is definitely Windows Phone 8 just like the Lumia itself it's a very different experience than your average smartphone and it's easily one of the sleekest and smooth this UI is out there the home screen is all about live tiles which do double duty is app icons and an addict glance bit of info for example a missed call or new tweet you can also resize the tiles and rearrange them as much as you'd like just like Windows 8 you can customize the colors the entire OS but beyond that what you see is basically what you get this is definitely not a phone for people who really like to customize as a Windows Phone you'll find integration with SkyDrive Office and Xbox Live Office is included and is decent for viewing or editing a word or excel doc on the go but not much more than that gaming was originally supposed to be a strong suit of Windows Phones as you can connect your xbox live gamertag and get achievements from mobile games but the selection is lacking you'll find a few games like Angry Birds and Final Fantasy but overall there really isn't much in the store right now and support is a little better you can find an app to do most things but a lot of what you'll find is really lacking in quality the Google app isn't bad if you want to avoid using Bing but it hasn't been updated nearly eight months the Twitter app is just terrible with constant crashes however and the list goes on that's not to say some apps aren't great and basically enough Internet Explorer really isn't bad just like the rest of Windows Phone its buttery smooth most of the time and is one of the fastest mobile browsers out there SunSpider is a great example of this it not just a score which is able to clear the iPhone 5 in Nexus 4 you run into occasional issues with fonts not rendering properly but overall it's a really nice browser I don't want to give the wrong impression here Windows Phone 8 is a major step forward and in some ways surpasses both iOS and Android the big issue is the lack of apps which hopefully will improve now the Windows Phone and Windows 8 share a lot of DNA but right now it's far behind its main rivals the camera on the other hand is the best you'll find on a modern smartphone period with eight point seven megapixels and an LED flash to work with it might not seem too great on paper but it has one major advantage optical image stabilization with tiny Springs inside the lens to keep it steady this allows the Lumia to deliver spectacular low-light performance comparing it to the iPhone 5 and Nexus 4 you can see there's really no contest it pulls an image is better than some point and shoots in normal daylight the images are quite nice as well although not a huge improvement over ordinary smartphones that optical image stabilization makes a big difference for video so I'm walking around on some pretty uneven here and yet the camera keeps it nice and smooth don't go ahead and bring it down here for you guys you see that 1080p video looks really nice on lumia 920 inside you'll find the Lumia 920 is powered by a 1.5 gigahertz Snapdragon s4 dual-core processor and one gigabyte of RAM Windows Phone has always been fast and this does a great job of making sure the phone stays incredibly smooth the Snapdragon s4 is starting to show its age as the s4 pro has been released but it's still an entirely competent performer impressively the phone includes 32 gigabytes of storage which is generous considering the price call quality is quite good on the AT&T network with LTE onboard if you have in your area you can expect impressive speeds unfortunately it hasn't rolled out here yet so I did my testing on HSPA+ which can give you reasonable speeds above 5 megabits per second battery life was good enough in my testing delivering enough juice to make it through a day of moderate use thanks to the 2000 milliamp hour battery the Nokia Lumia 920 is easily one of the most unique phones out there definitely in a good way it looks and feels like nothing else and Windows Phone 8 finally delivers modern specs including a dual-core processor an HD screen it's incredibly smooth and the camera is stellar but nap support is severely lacking and it is a big heavy phone it's not going to be for everyone but for only $99 you could do much much worse than the Lumia 920 you can check out more reviews of high-end phones here and if you enjoy be sure to hit that like button and subscribe for more anyway I'll catch you guys in the next one