Marketing aside, this screen is gorgeous. It's a 4. Really, the only knock I can deliver against it is that it does dim a bit when you're looking at it at sharp angles. Nokia stirred up a mini-controversy back in September when it announced the Lumia would come with the same PureView branding as the Symbian handset but without the corresponding megapixel sensor.
The common thread between the PureView and the cameras is excellent image quality for those who know how to handle a high-end camera. There are two major categories in which the Lumia excels: low-light performance and image stabilization. Both rely on what Nokia calls "floating lens technology.
By reducing camera shake in this fashion, Nokia can afford to keep the shutter open for longer, absorb more light, and deliver much brighter pictures. Video recording is also a big beneficiary of the new floating lens, making for much steadier pans and allowing you to move around without destroying the quality of your video.
Taking three shots of the same scene can sometimes produce as many as three different color temperatures: a beige coffee table appeared rosy in one image, a greenish yellow in the next, and the perfect pale taupe in the third. This same issue is apparent during video capture as well, with the camera sometimes tinting the entire scene into a new palette as it determines a new color balance. Nokia is also offering some software as exclusives to the Lumia line. The "Lenses" show up as options in the camera app, allowing you to launch custom camera apps directly and have their photos saved in the Photos Hub.
It produces good results so long as you hold the camera steady. The difference, unfortunately, is that Nokia hasn't built any way to actually share the animations, a completely perplexing foible in an otherwise neat feature. The biggest and most important change to Windows Phone 8 over previous versions is one users don't see directly: internal software plumbing shared with Windows 8.
Microsoft likes to say that it has managed to change the engine on a car speeding down the freeway without slowing down, and the metaphor is an apt one. It's remarkable that an OS can have its internals so radically changed and yet still feel the same on the outside. The Lumia , along with the rest of the latest batch of Windows Phone 8 devices, benefits from that updated core primarily because it can now run on a modern processor, Qualcomm's dual-core Snapdragon S4 clocked at 1.
It's actually a little difficult to gauge just how much of an effect that speedy processor has, for a couple of reasons. The first is that Windows Phone has always been built with responsiveness in mind, so improvements in animations and scrolling are subtle. The second is that Windows Phone 8 as an OS seems to be faster and more stable overall. Microsoft has definitely made some performance tweaks, improving scrolling and responsiveness throughout the OS.
I benchmarked the browser's javascript ranking with Sunspider and got ridiculously good results — around ms, which puts it in the same class as the iPhone 5 in terms of browser performance.
I should point out that HTC's Windows Phone 8X also achieved similar marks — no surprise since it uses the same processor. Overall, I never felt like the Lumia was slowed down because of its processor. Windows Phone 8 as a whole is a curious mix of incredible speed and maddening delays. Apps still take longer to boot from a cold start than they should, but once they're open every swipe and tap engenders an instantaneous response.
To go back to Microsoft's metaphor, it may have changed the engine but that has kept the company from devoting resources to overhauling the transmission. The good news is that there's a real feeling that the base here is much better than it was before and that there shouldn't be anything to hold the company back from improving the OS' imperfections going forward.
I have no complaints whatsoever about battery life. It has a 2,mAh battery, mAh more than the 8X, and that relatively small bump makes a big difference in terms of my peace of mind. The speaker on the Lumia is loud but obviously doesn't exhibit much bass, and strangely it can get much louder when playing music than it can on speakerphone. Call quality was uniformly good, but I've had intermittent issues with reception, especially on LTE.
Still, I found myself toggling Airplane mode to kick-start the radio a few times and it's something to keep an eye out for when retail units start shipping. We've already fully-reviewed Windows Phone 8 , but using a Nokia Lumia phone can be a very different experience from the base OS.
Nokia is aggressively adding its own software to the platform and just as aggressively courting third party developers for exclusives. In terms of third party apps, Nokia has a section of the store with entries like Groupon, Mirror's Edge yes, it's old, but it's so good , ESPN, and a few others.
But it's the first-party Nokia titles that really shine. Nokia Transit and Nokia Drive provide real options for navigation, while Nokia City Lens is an augmented reality app that makes for a good demo but isn't the most useful way to get around town. The Lumia is Nokia's flagship Windows 8 Phone.
It's a chunky handset with a large 4. 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 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 , with its polycarbonate unibody, and the Lumia 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 saw Web browsing is as snappy as you'd expect. I let a few of my non-tech savvy friends try the Lumia , and they came to the same conclusion. The Lumia is going to be too fat and heavy to appeal to most people. I know a lot of you will argue that Nokia made the Lumia so large so it could fit in a lot of advanced hardware components, but there are plenty of devices out there with similar features that still manage to be thin and light.
But if you can get past the size and weight, the Lumia is an attractive phone, mostly because it's so unique. It comes in a variety of colors —— I tested the lipstick-red model —— and there's no mistaking it for an iPhone or one of the myriad Android clones out there.
That's a good thing. The Lumia is one of the first devices to run Microsoft's new mobile operating system called Windows Phone 8, which supports high-end hardware features like sharper screens, faster processors, and NFC chips that put phone on equal footing with other premium smartphones.
The Lumia takes advantage of all those capabilities, and it's a nice step up from the inadequate hardware specs found in the Lumia That's great, but it still feels like the Lumia is playing catch up with the competition on the hardware level. And that's not going to be good for the Nokia when the next generation of smartphones hit the market in a few months.
There's one aspect where the Lumia blows away other smartphones: the camera. Nokia overpromised and underdelivered last time around with the Lumia 's camera, but the opposite is true with the Lumia I don't think Nokia adequately expressed just how good this camera is.
Photo quality is incredible, but I really liked the dedicated camera shutter button on the side. Holding it halfway down allows you to auto-focus the image, just like a normal DSLR or point-and-shoot digital camera. It's not enough to make me want to run out and buy a Lumia, but it did make me wish other phones had cameras this good. Battery life was also really good. I got well over a day's woth of use out of the Lumia , and standby time among the best of any smartphone I've used. On its own, Windows Phone 8 is a great operating system.
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