Nokia Lumia 920 review

The Nokia Lumia 920 takes its role as Windows Phone's "flagship" seriously: It feels like it's the size of an aircraft carrier. If you're willing to put up with a huge chunk of smartphone in your pocket, though, you'll get the best performance Windows Phone 8 has to offer, along with important, exclusive apps that really enhance the phone's experience. The handset is priced at $450 off-contract with AT&T in the US, with the UK price still to be confirmed. Given a direct conversion, $450 would be £280 in our money, but needless to say the Lumia 920 won't be anything like that cheap over here, with it likely to weigh in around the £450 mark in fact.

Physical design

Whether you like big phones is a personal choice, and while the Lumia 920 is too big for me, it might not be too big for you. At any rate, the Lumia 920 is built like a tank. Its main body is a thick block of polycarbonate with rolled edges and a 4.5in Gorilla Glass screen on the front.

The headphone jack is at the top centre of the phone; the micro USB jack is at the bottom centre. There's no memory card slot, and the battery is sealed in. The right side hosts the Volume, Power, and Camera buttons. They're all prominent and easy to press, although I kept confusing the Power and Camera buttons.

Nokia offers plenty of colour options, namely red, white, blue, yellow, grey and black. The red and yellow are both very aggressive and glossy, like an Italian sports car. The blue is bright, but less exclamatory. The black is matte, as is the grey, and the white is glossy and sleek. Of the bunch, I like the white and blue best. Too many phones are black, and the red and yellow are just bright enough to be divisive.
At 70 x 10 x 130mm (WxDxH), and weighing 185 grams, the Lumia 920 is the biggest, heaviest phone in its class. It's even heavier than the Samsung Galaxy Note II "phablet." While the Lumia 920 feels solid as a rock, it also weighs your pocket down like a stone.

You get a smaller screen here than on competing Android phones of the same size (4.5 versus 4.7in), but the 920's display is absolutely gorgeous. Nokia has loaded it down with meaningless buzz-words like "PureMotion" and "ClearBlack," but what we have here is a 1,280 x 768-pixel, IPS LCD panel with intensely deep blacks and super-saturated colours. It's higher density than the Apple iPhone 5's screen, at 331 pixels per inch to the iPhone's 325, and it's very bright. Sit the Lumia 920 next to the 4.3in HTC 8X, and the 8X looks a little dim and washed out. The bigger screen also makes Windows Phone's somewhat picky touch keyboard a lot more usable; I experienced noticeably fewer typos on the Lumia 920 than I did when reviewing the HTC 8X (look out for the finished review of HTC's Windows Phone 8 handset tomorrow).
With seemingly no concerns about weight, Nokia threw a 2000mAh battery into the 920's sealed case. I got 9 hours and 56 minutes of 3G talk time, which is very good, and just under four hours of streaming YouTube video on high screen brightness, which is average for high-end smartphones. In comparison, the HTC 8X had less talk time, but more streaming video time thanks to its smaller screen.
One of the Lumia's stand-out features is wireless charging, which Nokia talks about with great enthusiasm, but which various manufacturers have been trying to promote for years with little success. Wireless charging isn't completely wireless, of course: A charging pad still needs to be plugged into an outlet, but you don't need to plug anything into the actual phone itself.
Although the Lumia 920 doesn't have a memory card slot, it does have 32GB of built-in storage, more than any of the competing first-round Windows Phone 8 models.

Phone calls and Internet

The Lumia 920's voice call quality here is good, and better than I found with the HTC 8X. The earpiece and speakerphone are louder, and there's a ton of side-tone, preventing you from yelling into the phone.
The phone had no problem pairing with a Plantronics Voyager Legend Bluetooth headset and triggering Microsoft's voice commands from the headset. The voice command software, however, isn't great. It dials the phone just fine, but freeform queries like "how's the weather?" generate web searches rather than direct answers.
The Lumia 920 supports an insane number of frequency bands, making it able to connect to global HSPA+ and LTE networks – and it's compatible with EE's new 4G LTE network, with EE poised to start selling the 920 imminently. That will see some pretty nippy surfing speeds for Lumia owners on LTE, certainly if Riyad's experience with the Samsung Galaxy Note II is anything to go by.
The Lumia 920 also supports 2.4GHz and 5GHz 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0, GPS, and NFC. It can also be used as a Wi-Fi hotspot for up to five devices.

Apps and maps

The Nokia Lumia 920 and HTC 8X both use the same 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm S4 Krait processor. On cross-platform benchmark Antutu, the Lumia 920 performed similarly to the top echelon of Android phones. On web browser benchmarks, it showed the characteristics of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 10: Surprisingly slow Browsermark scores, fast Sunspider Javascript scores, and great Guimark HTML5 gaming scores. In my experience, that means pages appeared to start rendering more slowly than on competing Android phones, but once pages were rendered, they scrolled smoothly and interactive elements responded quickly.
For the ins and outs of the platform itself, read our Windows Phone 8 review. The difference in performance between Windows Phone devices is more about the included apps, and here Nokia has an edge. Nokia Maps, Drive, and Transport are a very big deal. Microsoft's Bing Maps isn't nearly up to the quality of Google Maps on Android. It has no turn-by-turn, voice-guided navigation, no transit directions, and a limited points of interest database with, in my neighbourhood, a lot of inaccuracies.