News · 21 Nov 2012 · MTW Editorial Team
Better late than never, right? Well, I finally received a Yellow Nokia Lumia 920 on Monday and started using it as my main phone since then so I’ve had a bit more than 24 hours to handle the beast so far which is enough hands-on time to give you my first impressions about the device (but keep in mind that my device isn’t brand new).
As previously reported the Lumia 920 isn’t for the faint hearted; it’s thicker and heavier than the competition. Thankfully this doesn’t seem to be much of an issue for me as the 185g really don’t feel like a lot when pocketed all day. One handed usage is equivalent to most other 4.5″+ devices on the market so you will see yourself using it with both hands most of the time.
Build quality is great but unfortunately not perfect on my particular device. The whole polycarbonate body is apparently thinner than the previous Lumia 800 and 900 bodies and can creak when pressure is applied in certain areas. There’s also a relatively big air gap between the screen and the actual LCD panel (I can see light bleeding underneath the black bezel when I tilt my handset at extreme angles) this directly impacts the quality of the viewing angles as there’s a significant drop in brightness (but colors stay intact).
Performance has been nothing but perfect since I first booted the 920 on Monday. I didn’t experience any reboot or crash so far and everything is flying as it should. app loading times are significantly better than on Windows Phone 7.X phones (I’ll shoot plenty of videos). Battery life on the other hand seems to be a problem for many users including me. This is sadly reminiscent of the infamous Nokia Lumia 800 power consumption issues that I loudly complained about here and helped Nokia fix a couple of months ago. I’m currently using the 920 with the screen brightness set to medium (don’t like auto even though it’s the fastest and smoothest/accurate implementation I have experienced on a handsets so far), NFC off, BT Off, no push-mail, really moderate usage and couldn’t get more than 10 hours out of it before it died (and yes I made sure to disable applications running in the background, especially Nokia Drive+ beta). I wouldn’t be surprised if this was caused by a similar power management/radio bug as on the Lumia 800 and I’ve also noticed that the GSM data connection is still being used by the phone even when WiFi is on and connected (strange…).
Camera has been good so far. Colors are natural and low light performance exceptional. I fully expect Nokia to also issue an update to the camera stack shortly to tweak the sharpness. I will obviously go in-depth later on. BTW beware that the default video recording resolution is set to 720P so don’t forget to change it to A080P and SAVE the change.
Call quality seems to be good but reception is always one bar less than on my Lumia 800 (different OS so this may be why..don’t know yet). This is not handset related, but I’m annoyed that there’s no SMS delivery option in WP8 anymore..meh… So these are my initial impressions so far and should be taken as such. Keep your eyes open for more coverage and videos in the days to come and please post your questions or share your own experience below or on twitter.
PS: Nokia Maps, Drive + Beta and Transit are frigging awesome…
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