In the shadow of an impending new iPhone launch, Finnish mobilephone maker Nokia announced the launch of their two new Windows Phone powered devices at a much publicized event at New York. A few bloggers from India were also invited by Nokia to watch the webcast live from Delhi followed by a (limited) hands on of the new devices. While the announcement went on quite smoothly – except for some initial glitches with the webcast, there were some controversies that brewed post that. Before we take a look at those, we will talk about the all important new launches first.
The Lumia 920
While its existence was confirmed much before the actual announcement, the Lumia 920 did come with its own share of secrets. It was certainly rumored to get “PureView” imaging technology but there was no clarity about the fact regarding the size of its all important sensor. As it turned out, Nokia had implemented a few other innovations to the Camera on the Lumia 920 which was its claim to use the “PureView” brand on the device.
The Lumia 920 replaces the Lumia 900 as the flagship Nokia Windows Phone device. The 920 will run Windows Phone 8 at launch and is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 chipset which hosts a 1.5 Ghz dual core Krait processor. The graphics bit is handled by the Adreno 225 GPU. While it looks similar to the Lumia 900, the 920 gets a larger display with much better resolution. Talking about the display, Nokia has implemented a new technology called PureMotion HD+ which claims to offer much better transitions as the pixels move much faster than on traditional LCD displays. As it is clear, the phone does not sport an AMOLED display. The resolution of the display is 1280*768 pixels which matches most Android flagships out there.
Let’s talk about the all-important camera now. While the PureView branded camera only gets the ability to capture images at at a maximum of 8 megapixels, its claim to PureView branding is the improved optics that has went inside the handset. Nokia uses what it calls a new “floating lens” technology that according to them gives the phone advanced image stabilization capabilities that even betters the ones seen on full fledged digital cameras. While we would certainly pass judgment on it only after we get a review unit in our hands, the image samples that Nokia showed us did excite us. There wes a video sample too which showcased the OIS technology visavis a leading competitor. This was however later proved to be actually captured using a professional camera. This was the controversy we were talking about earlier. Nokia did however apologize and uploaded an actual video captured using PureView.
Here are both the advertisements.
The one below is the “Fake” one.
This is the original video, actually taken from the Lumia 920
Nokia also showcased a few image samples taken in low light and the results we saw were excellent. Now, we surely hope they were actual image samples taken using the Lumia 920.
The Lumia 920 runs the latest version of Windows Phone – the version 8 and packs in a whole bunch of improvements over the outgoing version 7.8. We will not be going in to the details of Windows Phone8 here as it deserves a separate post of its own. Nokia has said that most apps designed for windows Phone 7.5 will work without issues on Windows Phone 8 as well.
The Lumia 920 packs in 32 GB of internal memory and also offers users 7 GB of cloud space on Microsoft’s Skydrive. The 1.5Ghz processor is supported with 1GB worth of RAM as well which should make the phone very fast. While Windows Phone 8 does support memory expansion, Nokia has decided against giving the Lumia 920 one for reasons best known to them. This is perplexing because the lower priced Lumia 820 does sport one.
One of the highlights of the Lumia 920 is its wireless charging capability. The Wireless charging is based on the “Qi” (pronounced Chee) standard and will open up vistas for new Wireless charging accessories that would be seen in the future. Nokia showcased a wireless charging accessory called “Fatboy”. It would be great if Nokia would include the same in the retail package instead of making people buy one. The company also announced partnerships with Virgin Atlantic and Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf wherein users would be able to wirelessly charge their Nokia phones whilst in their premises.
The Lumia 920 did impress us overall with its style and features list. But we wonder if it it still has what it takes to stand out alone from the crowd.
