At Nokia’s Windows Phone 8 event, Nokia announced a brand new flagship phone, the Lumia 920. It’s the first Windows Phone 8 device from Nokia, Microsoft’s premium partner and is has a 4.5” display. The phone has a couple of nice features, an amazing camera, the PureView technology and quality we first seen on 808 is now squashed into a form factor similar to the Lumia 900.
Powered by a Snapdragon S4 dual-core processor, the phone also has the necessary frequencies to support 4G speeds in Australia!
The other innovative feature is wireless charging, not much detail to go on yet, but expect this to work like your inductive charging toothbrush. There has been many 3rd party cases and mats that offer this. Nokia is using an emerging standard for wireless standard chi. 3rd party companies like FatBoy have made hockey pucks, which you place the Lumia 920 down onto for charging. Nokia have made various deals in airports, coffee shops to provide wireless charging. What I’d really love to see is a replacement for my bedside table with wireless charging tops.
Nokia Maps is also getting offline mode in WP8, along with a new feature called Nokia City Lens. This lets you point the camera down a stream and have the augmented reality experience of information overlays displayed real time. Again this has been done from 3rd party apps on other platforms for a long time, but they have been buggy. Let’s hope the Nokia have nailed it with City Lens.
Windows Phone 8
Corporate Vice President of Windows Phone, Jo Belfiore demo’d some of the features in Windows Phone 8. Importantly he explained that they would not be unveiling all of WP8 features today. This means today is another preview of what’s coming, not the big unveiling as expected.
WP8 is finally getting screen shot functionality which is done using Power+Home button, I guess they licenced that from Apple. Leveraging Nokia’s fancy PureView camera, Belfiore showed off a number of 3rd party camera extensions to apply effects etc. There is of course the smaller tiles available in WP8, but this is not new news today.
Kevin Shields, Senior VP at Nokia, took the stage to explain their bold claim that the ‘Lumia 920 is the most innovative smartphone’. He says the design and manufacturing quality, together with strength of glass, great camera and awesome display add up to an overall experience.
The WXGA, higher than 720p resolution display has a pixel transition speed more than 2.5x competitors. Apparently the fastest LCD ever on a phone. The Lumia 920 also adds super sensitive touch glass that works through snow gloves.
Shields demo’d of a JBL dock and and Monster headphones that can take playing music from the Lumia 920 and be transferred to the devices via NFC. The demo was pretty shaky, it took multiple times to work, which was blamed on the connectivity flood from devices in the room. Given NFC works at such a short distance, this is a stretch at best.
Again we moved back to focus on the centrepiece of this phone, the camera. The 8.7 megapixels actually features optical image stabilisation. This allows for much better shooting in low-light conditions and dramatically helps to reduce noise in images.
While no pricing or availability was announced today, Nokia has published the official site for the Lumia 920, for all the specs and photos, check out http://www.nokia.com/global/products/phone/lumia920/specifications/
