[Preview] Nokia Lumia 920: Nokia’s Flag Bearer Into Windows Phone 8 Era

Among all Windows Phone 8 devices that have been officially revealed to the public for the past few months, there is one device in particular that have managed to gather slightly more attention that the rest. To be fair, it was not exactly for the right reason but nevertheless, we believe that it is still not farfetched to say that the new Nokia Lumia 920 is the company’s current pride and joy.

This is due to the fact that Nokia has equipped the new Lumia 920 with quite a number of premium features such as the new generation PureView technology – a combination of optical image stabilization and Carl Zeiss lens – on its 8.7-megapixels main camera as well as the PureMotion HD+ technology (here’s a whitepaper on it) that promises to make Lumia 920’s 4.5-inch display as one of the best smartphone display in the market.

Whether those technology are actually as good as Nokia claimed to be is a totally different story altogether and that can only be answered in the near future once we manage to experience the smartphone for much longer time for the purpose of a proper review. For the time being, click on the Read More link below for a glimpse of Nokia’s new Windows Phone 8 flagship smartphone from our brief encounter with it recently.

 As per the original Nokia Lumia 900, Nokia’s Windows Phone 8 flagship device is rather bulky. Just take a look at its profile shots below:

That being said, the Lumia 920 is actually thinner than Lumia 900 at 10.3mm but at the same time, Lumia 920 also weights around 185g which is slightly heavier than Lumia 900. It is also interesting to note that the yellow colorway of Lumia 920 comes in highly glossy finish which is to us doesn’t really project the device’s status as Nokia’s premium smartphone.

In terms of internal hardware, the new Nokia Lumia 920 is powered by a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 MSM8960 System-on-Chip processor with CPU clock speed of 1.5GHz and Adreno 225 as its GPU. Apart from that, it is also equipped with 1GB of RAM and 32GB worth of internal storage. Even though Windows Phone 8 itself now supports microSD card, Nokia has decided not to include flash storage card slot on Lumia 920 which means that users have to depend on secondary cloud-based storage such as SkyDrive when the need arises.

Nokia Lumia 920’s 8.7-megapixels main camera with dual LED flash. There is also a 1.3-megapixels front facing camera built into Lumia 920.

As mentioned early on, it was quite unfortunate that our time with the Lumia 920 was too brief for us to actually test the star feature of the device – its PureView camera. Nevertheless, we did briefly spent some time with a number of Lens apps that Nokia has per-installed to this particular unit:

Cinemagraph: it’s an animated GIF maker, in general.

Panorama: step-by-step wizard to capture panoramic photograph.

Smart Shoot: it snaps several photos at the point of capture, so that users can choose the best photos that they want to save. 

The other feature of Lumia 920 that has been highlighted is the PureMotion HD+ technology on its 4.5-inch IPS display. While the higher level of details is quite apparent when you put it next to a Lumia 820 since the native resolution of Lumia 920’s display is 1280×768, we didn’t get to test out the said technology due to lack of contents in the device as well as the fact that we were actually indoors which made us unable to test the display’s sunlight readability enhancement feature.

The picture above might not be able to give justice to both Lumia 920 and Lumia 820 but at the time this image was taken, their brightness level have been set to maximum. 

In addition to that, we also tested out the Nokia City Lens augmented reality app on the device although as you can see on the screenshot below, much of the data in the app are still nowhere near accurate. No, Sunway Pyramid is definitely nowhere near KLCC.

Meanwhile, the Nokia Lumia 920 does have quite a number of features that it actually shared with Nokia Lumia 820 apart from having the same dual-core 1.5GHz processor. One of them is the Dolby Headphones audio enhancements which come complete with tweakable EQ settings as well as the ability to boost up the sensitivity of its touch display that would allow users to use the device’s display even with gloves on.

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This will definitely not be the last time that we will be seeing Nokia Lumia 920 as there are still more that we haven’t touch about the device such as its pricing, availability, wireless charging functionality and of course, the full capability of its PureView camera. Nokia Malaysia have hinted that more details about Lumia 920 and Lumia 820 will be unveiled as we get close to their eventual release, so stay tuned.