- Price:
- £550 ish
- Rating:
- 3
Reviewed by:
Summary:
I’ve been given a Lumia 920 to have a trial by Nokia and I haven’t had the best of luck with it so far unfortunately. Lots of freezing and crashing applications – especially Twitter! – have absolutely done my head in. I’ve found that the standard messaging app has crashed several times whilst I was in the middle of sending a fairly long text (about 500 characters long) and had to start over again. The most annoying thing is that when the phone froze, sometimes for up to half an hour, I couldn’t remove the battery to restart it so just had to wait it out. Not great when when it happened to the maps app I had open when I was lost! And generally I’ve found the Lumia 920 to be slow in general considering it’s a brand new phone. The sound quality is good though on phonecalls and the aerial is effective; reminding me of Nokia’s good old days!
I’m used to the Samsung Galaxy S2 though, so obviously there was a lot for the Nokia Lumia 920 to live up to. I had the Samsung Galaxy S and I loved it, and I love the S2 even more. I like the size of the S2, the quick texting using swype, the great camera, the super quick processor, the Android interface… So when I was given the Lumia 920 to sample it was definitely up against some fierce competition before I even got it out of the box. The very first thing I noticed though was that the Lumia is so heavy. It actually makes my arm ache to hold it when I’m on a call, but the phone itself is lovely and smooth. Its uniform shape is attractive, and its 4.5″ HD screen is actually stunning, but just a little too big to use one handed. The 8.7MP camera with Carl Zeiss lens is sharp and actually the most responsive element of the phone, and is also really good. I like that it has a dedicated button. I didn’t like the wide screen pictures it produced, but there’s probably a setting I could change somewhere to make the pictures less long. What I couldn’t change was the sluggish response of 2-touch zoom changing when looking at images and webpages. Using the phone with 1 finger it very responsive, but with 2 it takes a while to recognize what you’re doing.
The battery lasts longer than my S2, even with some charge left at the end of the day. Although I didn’t like how it didn’t give me much notice before it switched itself off though. I also didn’t like that every time I went through an area with wifi an alert came up which I couldn’t close right at the top of the screen, actually on top of the app I was looking at. I actually had quite a lot of difficulties logging on to some wifi networks, and some were impossible; even though I’d had no problem logging onto the same network on my Galaxy S2. However the thing I really didn’t understand about this phone is why the 3 touchscreen buttons at the bottom (back, home and search) even included a dedicated search button. And to Bing – seriously, who uses Bing?! Most apps come up with a ‘…’ symbol for more settings; surely it would have made more sense for the search button to be replaced by this? Personally, I found it a waste of time and space having the search button as I ended up logging onto Google on the browser. This was a bit of a pain as it only allows you to use 6 tabs on the internet explorer.
Other things which didn’t make sense to me was why my contacts had to be linked to my Microsoft Outlook account, and I had to manually go through and delete contacts which I didn’t want to see. When I hid the Outlook contacts I couldn’t even see the contacts on my sim card. The annoying thing is I don’t even use my Outlook email account, I use Gmail, but the phone still found it necessary to tell me when my Outlook email had received a message, even though they’re forwarded onto my Gmail account anyway. As such the phone was constantly buzzing with emails, Twitter and FB alerts which was a pain in the arse.
Anyway, I didn’t have any problems with the buttons being too small when texting, but I think the next word prediction on this phone was actually excellent. It did make texting quite quick, and some of the suggestions for the next word were really funny and random. The Nokia generally is quite simple to use, but it doesn’t allow for much customisation. I’m not a huge fan of the Windows 8 tile home screen. I found it quite unattractive and unnecessary big, even when I made the tiles small. I wasn’t that impressed with the apps available but I understand that the Windows app store (or whatever they call it…) is still in its infancy and will take a while to get to the same level as Apple and Android. I can’t see me getting a Windows phone any time soon, and as such I probably won’t be getting a Nokia phone for a while either.
I’m so glad I got to trial this phone because I would have been gutted if I bought it. I was pining to go back to my old phone after the Lumia crashed for the third time in an hour… It’s not a bad phone by any stretch of the imagination, but a lot of what it does doesn’t make sense to me. I’d still recommend Android to those who want a faster phone and for those who want to customise their phone a bit more and have a wider access to lots of apps, all at a more reasonable price. If you do want a Windows phone though it may be cheaper to go with one of the alternatives; the OS are all the same on all devices. However I would probably wait until there are more apps available. If you do go for a Lumia make sure you are well aware that the apps may crash and freeze too; so again it may be worth waiting until this glitch is fixed.
