I have been waiting for this day for a long long time. I was invited by Nokia India to come to Delhi to watch the live cast with fellow amazing bloggers. So two things happened yesterday: The webcast and dinner. Oh, did I miss the part where I got to touch 820 and 920? Whoopsie daisies. I didn’t spend a lot of time with the device but long enough to feel both the devices – we are allowed to do limited stuff with the device (like no opening any application and browsing to settings, hah). For me it was a familiar experience because I have been able to use the leaked WP8 sdk on the emulator for quite some time now. However resizing the tiles on touch feels really neat.
So about Lumia 820. Lumia 820 is without a doubt a mid range device. It’s a successor to 800 and looks just as amazing as Lumia 800. It feels extremely nice in hands and 4.3 inches is perfect screen size in my opinion. 820 comes with 1.5 GHz dual core Snapdragon S4, 1 GB RAM, NFC, Qi Wireless charging, 8 GB with micro SD support upto 32 GB and wVGA resolution of 800 x 480 which is a tad disappointing. So yes, it does have a spec bump when compared to 800 so it’s not just a minor upgrade – it’s big and IMO, this device is what Nokia will go on to sell the most. Exchangeable covers is an excellent addon to this device. The screen is crisp. Yes this doesn’t have the PureMotion HD+ display you will find on 920 but you wouldn’t notice any difference from the fantastic display on 800. One thing i would have loved to check out on 820 was the speaker quality. Lumia 800 just had a godawful speaker and hopefully they fixed it on the 820. It has dual cameras as well – VGA on the front and 8 MP on the back. This device is a winner for me and if it’s priced like the current price of Lumia 800 or better yet below it – we’ll surely have a winner however keep in mind that Lumia 800 isn’t a mid range phone. So to be precise, Nokia has no mid range strategy as of now and will not have one this year unless they cut profits on 820 (which IMO, they should). I hope to spend more time with the device but i’d like you to imagine as Lumia 800 v2 with a big enough spec bump to make it worth your money.
Lumia 920. The big guy. The whole webcast was about this guy. It’s a beauty and the beast packed into one singular entity. It’s probably the most premium feeling phone I have ever held in my hand. It just feels so incredible just to hold it. It’s been designed to perfection. Lumia 920 is nokia’s premium offering competing with the Samsung GS3, upcoming iPhone 5, HTC One X, etc so it’s going to be really expensive (but that doesn’t stop people buying from phone these days so it’s a non issue). Right, so 920 has a 4.5 inch display which was incredible. I have never seen a Windows Phone screen look so good. Nokia introduced it’s new display technology PureMotion HD+ (somebody is taking cues from Droid manufacturers on weird nomenclatures..) and it works. 920 display was significantly better than what I have seen on any WP device. The resolution on this thing is 1280 x 768. Rest of the features are same as in Lumia 820. 920 has a 2000 mAh battery which, according to Nokia “gives an excellent battery life”. So i’ll take their word. There’s one thing I noticed but haven’t been able to verify is the dual speaker right at the bottom. The only one thing that disappointed me was the lack of micro SD card expansion support. Samsung did it with Ativ S, why didn’t you do it Nokia? So yes the big one – Lumia 920 is actually Pureview! That’s exciting but nobody was allowed to take a picture of it so…bummer. I think we’ll wait for a review device to test the camera.
We got to see the wireless charging pad in action as well and I can tell you it’s a day one purchase. Also, the Dolby certified headphones are really very good, we got to try them out too.
I am going to reserve my comments about the webcast and the so called “Nokia FakeView” debacle for later. At this point – I’d like to congratulate Nokia for the amazing devices they have created for Windows Phone 8 and I can tell you, I have started to save my money for Lumia 920. I would like to thank Nokia India for inviting me and thank all the fellow bloggers for the good times. I did capture a few pictures from my HTC Mozart. Yes I would dumb enough to carry this 2010 Windows Phone 7 device to capture pictures of a 2012 Windows Phone 8 device but yeah..I did anyways. Feel free to go through em and let me know if you have any questions.
Lumia 820
Lumia 820
Fatboy wireless charging pad for Lumia 820 and Lumia 920
Dolby certified headsets for lumia 820 and lumia 920
Lumia 920
Lumia 920
Lumia 920 and Lumia 820
Lumia 920 and lumia 820
Lumia 820 and Lumia 920
Specs for Nokia 820 and Nokia Lumia 920 here and here
Regarding the OS: There is no noticeable change from the leaked SDK environment. No new multi tasking UI or notification center. I wasn’t able to go through settings so can’t tell you guys more. We will have more on this when we get a review device. Stay tuned in for more Windows Phone 8!
