Gadgetory

hey this is dieter bone for The Verge and this is the Nokia Lumia 920 launching this month on AT&T it's a new flagship phone running Windows Phone 8 and it's sort of a second coming for both Microsoft and Nokia the first thing you notice when you pick up the phone is it's a tank it's a really really big phone it's really heavy it clocks in at a hundred and eighty five grams which is actually more than 50% heavier than the iPhone 5 there's a couple of reasons for it to be so big one is it has a wireless inductive charging on the back and two is that it has this a pure view camera it's an 8 megapixel camera but what's special about it is that the lens is actually seated in some Springs that keep it steady for longer shots and that adds quite a bit of thickness to the phone and actually if you shake the phone you can even hear the lens bouncing around inside there so let's talk about the standout feature of the phone the other PureView camera of course you can launch it with the shutter button and again the way it works is the cameras mounted in Springs so when you take a shot the shutter stays open for just a little bit longer and I found that hitting the shutter button makes it so it you get a little bit of shake but if you do tap to take a picture you can get some really really good shots it's incredible in low-light and it also does very good job of stabilizing for when you're shooting video so you can see for example here we took us and low-light shots last night and it does a very good job in near total darkness in fact it gives you pictures that are brighter than what the human eye can see when you're not in ridiculously low light situations and you're just taking pictures like you do with the camera phone they come out really really well I will say the colors are a little bit muted but that's kind of just nokia style but I mean everything is really sharp everything is really crisp and I'm really impressed with this camera and you should be too so the screen on the Nokia Lumia 920 is a 4.5 inch screen at 1280 by 768 resolution and Nokia has a couple of technologies that they talk about the first is it's clear black which is a polarizing layer that makes the blacks a little bit darker it's not quite as dark as it was on the 900 but of course that was an AMOLED display whereas this is an IPS LCD display I think it has really great colors on it I'm really happy with it the other thing is called a pure motion HD Plus which is Nokia guaranteeing that frame rates won't dip below I think it's 60 frames per second and it you won't see blurring when you're scrolling suffering on the screen and I mean it's there right there's very very little blur at all as you move stuff around or as you open up apps everything is very very crisp and sharp and to be honest it's really nice to finally see Windows Phone on a high-resolution display we've been waiting for it for a long time it's a much nicer experience so the other big thing about the 920 is that it's based on Windows Phone 8 the latest version of Windows Phone the big thing about Windows Phone is they spent a lot of time re architecting it from the ground up to share the same core as Windows 8 and what that means is you can have faster processors bigger screens and faster Hardware iterations in terms of actually user experience it's very similar to Windows Phone 7.5 now you get these smaller live tiles there's the Kids Corner but the important thing for the 920 is there's a whole bunch of custom Nokia apps so you've got Nokia Maps which is a iteration on Bing Maps that has a couple nice usability tweaks like you can scroll up from the map view to see local places Nokia also has included their own driving directions and transit directions which is a essential thing I'm smartphone if you ask me and then there's also Nokia music which is a free music streaming service which is pretty cool but not really important anymore for most people since Microsoft has finally got Xbox music streaming set up properly as nice as Windows Phone 8 is it still has some of the same problems that Windows Phone 7 does if you miss notification and you don't have a live tile for it it's basically gone and the app selection it's not quite there it's getting better but the real problem is a lot of the apps don't feel as up-to-date as they do on other platforms but you know if you're choosing Windows Phone 8 you're basically choosing to make a compromise and the 920 is also about compromise you're compromising having a small and light phone for a really really good camera it's a big and bulky phone primarily because of the incredible camera here if you're willing to make that compromise if you really want that camera I think you'll find that you'll come to have a real affinity for the phone especially because it has such really good industrial design but if the camera is not a must-have for you there are smaller and lighter options Nokia's Lumia 920 is out in Europe this weekend 18 DS version is only due sometime in November we still don't have a firm price or release date