Gadgetory

hey guys ashley with TechnoBuffalo we are checking out the official this is it the official review for the Nokia Lumia 928 so here it is the Nokia or Nakia depending on where you live in the world 928 this is the Verizon variant of the Lumia 920 let's talk with the hardware first this is a pretty long review that I have posted so I'll try to get through this quickly you can see the edges have been kind of cropped off they're a little bit sharper than the 920 s which were a lot more rounded it's still a little bit curved on the bottom you can see there's sort of a a curve there which is nice but generally speaking still feels good in the hand it's not it's not any more difficult to hold than the 920 is which is a nice thing but it does deviate a little bit from Nokia's design standard that we're used to seeing so the other thing is we have the white polycarbonate body here but unfortunately for you Verizon users you will not be seeing this in any of the colorful variants like the cyan or red anything like that it only comes in black and white on Verizon so unfortunately for you guys if you are looking to add a little style to your Lumia 928 you are a little bit out of luck you'll notice they now have a xenon flash here there is not just a dual LED flash it is a xenon very powerful very cool they've also moved the speaker to the bottom here it used to be on on the bottom of the device on the 920 they've now moved it to the back of the device and it's kind of nice because there's a little curve right here so when you put the phone down on a table face up it doesn't sit flush so when you get a call and want to put it on speaker you don't actually have to worry about it sounding muffled it's it's a really nice feature and I think it's a really good idea the buttons on the side have been rounded quite a bit they're really subtle and I still kind of find myself missing the power button to wake it from its sleep I know that that's a little bit weird but the tactile response is not quite as I guess prominent as I would like it to be and my very last thing about the 928 that I just can't stand and this is a personal preference for people is that this microUSB cable is on the top of the device now I am I guess a phone purist and I like to have my micro USB plug on the bottom because when you're sitting at your desk and you have it plugged in it's plugged in upside down which is really frustrating and kind of annoying so unless you have a permanent cable coming up from the back of your desk this that might annoy you just like it annoyed me so I'm not a fan of that but let's turn it on let's check it out we have Verizon red as our theme of course because it is a Verizon device which is super awesome for Verizon users who were hoping to get a flagship Windows Phone 8 device so the specs on this phone are actually pretty good they're almost identical to the 920 so it has a dual-core 1.5 gigahertz processor 1 gig of ram and 8.7 megapixel rear camera a four and a half inch screen and a two thousand milliamp battery the screen however has been replaced instead of an IPS LCD there is now an AMOLED screen and it is absolutely gorgeous I love it there's almost no separation when you are looking at the phone at an angle the viewing angles are very very good I don't know why you would be you know using your phone at 178 degrees but generally speaking it is a very nice phone to look at I am a big fan of it and you would be too if you saw it in person I mean it's just absolutely gorgeous as for the software there's not much here that's a lot different than Windows Phone 8 on the 920 but there is of course your standard Verizon apps that are available here is VZ Navigator the cool thing about Verizon's kind of bloatware on windows 8 devices or Windows Phone 8 devices is that you could actually uninstall them so if you are not a fan of easy navigator you can uninstall that which is super nice and definitely something that I really enjoy as a detail because often times I don't need things like NFL mobile and you might which is great but it's not for me you also have Nokia suite of apps you have here city lens here maps and they also have Nokia drive plus beta which is very very good it's a great substitute for Google Maps of course Google Maps always the number one if I had to choose but this will definitely do a good job if you need to get somewhere and of course in Windows Phone eight we now have resizable live tiles and you can actually make them three different sizes so if we want to make them very small we can do that we can go the width of the screen and we can also go back to the square sort of medium sized tile which is cool I always love the Xbox integration it's great I still smile every time I see my little tiny Xbox avatar on there and of course being able to have live tiles is just it's really fancy and I think that a lot of people it's John and I have talked about Windows Phone 8 as being the greatest OS that most people aren't using and so I definitely think that that carries through to the Lumia 928 as for performance it definitely doesn't give us much lag i mean the the response is very very good i am a big fan of the gaming on this I have jetpack joyride which is super awesome so I'm going to to play that I'm going to turn it down just a little bit but we are going to play let's play some jetpack joyride shall we so you can see it's a it's really responsive obviously this is not the most graphics intensive game but they do have nova 3 and other games and also the halo game spartan assault will be out next month so i'm really curious to see how that performs on a device like the Lumia 928 I now have my hog very exciting I'm gonna jump and run over scientists and shoot them and pick up coins and do all the things and I'm really good at jetpack joyride so I'm not gonna keep playing I'm just gonna die on purpose let's go back to our home screen but hopefully halo Spartan assault the exclusivity for Windows 8 Windows Phone 8 will bring more people to the platform because I definitely think that is a thing that Microsoft could absolutely leverage in bringing more people to the platform the camera is really really good I mean obviously PureView is the technology that they use and again just like the Lumia 920 it's very good in low light I have some pictures of Luci I've got some video here it shoots in 1080 or 720 you can actually pick that natively which is something that not a lot of apps do I know - for example the iPhone 5 you have to use a third-party app for that so it is nice to have that option available this is one of my robots now I'm gonna show you something that the flash does which is a little bit strange now you would expect with a xenon flash that you would have a better image in the dark now I shot this underneath my desk and there was no light this is without flash now if I go to the image with flash you can see it's really bright and it almost over corrects and over saturates an image with the flash and I'm not sure if that's a white balancing issue it does seem to kind of be a combination of a strange white balancing that's happening when you use the xenon flash in a low light situation and also an oversaturation issue now hopefully Nokia will put out some sort of software update for the 928 to sort of correct this because it is a little bit obnoxious in terms of software so you can see again this is without flash and then we have this really kind of oversaturated color that's happening with the desk so it's a little bit more true to color if you're if you're looking at it without flash again this is with flash and without so you can definitely see there are some big differences in the color saturation for each picture so I'm not sure what's happening there but generally speaking it does take very nice pictures I do love the way that it takes low-light pictures it's fantastic another thing that they offer is you can actually go into your apps you have photo apps so we have creative studio available to us where you're able to pick some different filters just like you would in an Instagram app or the like and you can also do other things to your photos so if you wanted to if you wanted to edit it you could actually do shift tilting you can do focus one object where you pick the actual outline you can do a color pop you can do a collage there's adjustments standard adjustments and also fixing so cropping and rotating and redeye so it's a very nice feature set that's available to you the other thing that I really like about the camera is that while you're taking pictures is that while you're taking pictures you can actually go into your photo and video settings and and choose a few different things you can actually choose continuous focus on or off which is really helpful as opposed to the iPhone where you have to sort of double tap with your fingers and sort of manipulate the camera app a little bit more than you would normally have to which is a little bit silly so our photo settings we can also pick scenes you can pick different scenes but a very good job by Nokia in their camera app I definitely think that they are at the front if not the leader of the pack in terms of native and default photo apps but overall like I said the Nokia nine to the Lumia 928 camera is really really good and anybody with a smartphone a flagship smartphone would find that this definitely is up there with the iPhone 5s and the HTC ones of the world as for a call quality and data data transfer the call quality on the phone is really clear when you make a phone call it sounds really good I'm sure it doesn't hurt that I am on Verizon's LTE network which is extremely fast when we were using this and we did our speed test you can see we had these are our speeds that were happening earlier today after it locates my closest server let's go see where our results were so you can see here on the 19th we had 15 down and 10 up which is really respectable super fast and I am a huge fan of Verizon's LTE network it's extremely broad there's a lot of coverage out there which is great so if you're looking at that coverage speed and you haven't upgraded to an LTE device now you know what you're going to get if you are in an area LTE coverage and we have about four bars of LTE here at any given time we can see now right now we have two because we're in the conference room but generally speaking we have about four now as for your battery life it has a two thousand milliamp battery which compared to other phones of its size might not seem like a lot but because of the optimization in Windows Phone eight you're gonna get a really full day's worth out of your battery life so you don't have to worry about using this phone and having it die in the middle of your day however I will note that if you are a very heavy media user you will actually have issues with battery life around six hours so if you are let's say at Disneyland let's say maybe you have spotty coverage this is definitely a phone that will get you through a lot of the day when compared to something like an Android device with the same battery capacity but generally speaking if you are a heavy media user as always you're gonna have a lot shorter battery life just keep that in mind but that is pretty much the Nokia Lumia 928 it's very similar to the Lumia 920 in some ways but then in other ways it's a little bit different and it's honestly really really exciting for Verizon users this phone is only $49 on contract right now which is pretty much an insane deal so if you're interested at all in Windows Phone 8 I highly suggest that you get yourself down to your verizon brick-and-mortar and you test this phone out because it is honestly a great device and I really enjoyed using it I loved it thought it was fantastic this is office you can see we've got some really great apps if you are a Windows user you will find yourself right at home in Windows Phone 8 and you will really like the way their apps are design their native apps are beautiful however if you are mired in the iOS or Apple ecosystem you will have a very difficult time with this phone the same goes for Google you can still set up everything through CalDAV however and in car dev but the problem is is that you you aren't getting those native apps from Google so you won't be seeing Google Maps on here unless you use it through the browser and we all know it's not as good of an experience so overall I think obviously Windows is still experiencing some growing pains some very serious growing pains however I think that being said this is a great device it's very solid it is very quick its responsive and I think anybody who is a Windows fan or a Microsoft fan would be happy to use this on the Verizon LTE network I really enjoyed it there is a lack of apps for certain things but on that same note there are things like instance where you can use that to substitute for Instagram so there are third-party apps that will help you out and help fill those gaps so we're gonna go to TechnoBuffalo so we can show you how how it renders we'll use Bing we're gonna Bing it that's our new favorite search term so here's our beautiful web results and you can see we're on Wi-Fi right now I'm not on Verizon LTE but you can see everything renders quite nicely it's not terrible at all and that is the Lumia 928 so we will see you for the next review and thanks for watching you