Battery life and inductive charging
The Lumia 920 has been kitted out with the ability to charge inductively. This means it's able to receive power by touching a charging pad, rather than being directly connected to a plug. We've already seen this idea before with PowerMat, but the technology is built right into the phone, rather than needing to add an extra case onto it.
The 920 comes with a charging pad -- a plastic disk that connects to the mains and sits on your desk. To charge your phone, you simply put it on the disk. You don't need to attach any cables or hit any switches -- it will immediately start to draw power. It's extremely handy to be able to just put your phone down and not need to untangle any cables before plugging it in.
It features wireless charging wizardry to re-juice without having to plug in, like this gadget it's sitting on.
The idea is that you can have numerous pads all round your house -- your bedside table, your coffee table, your kitchen -- and a bunch more in your office. While I really like the idea, the pads are sold individually. Nokia hasn't been able to tell me exactly how much they cost, but I doubt they'll come under £20. Buy five or six of these, as Nokia suggests, and you'll suddenly find you can't afford those sharp new shoes.
Still, it's a neat way of tackling the age-old problem of stretching your smart phone's battery life throughout the day. Sadly, that's quite a problem with the 920 -- I didn't find its battery life impressive at all.
Although it packs in a capacious 2,000mAh cell, I found with pretty heavy use (downloading apps, using maps and tracking, sending numerous texts and emails) for around 4 hours it had gone from fully charged to around 25 per cent remaining. It certainly won't last an entire working day.
That's extremely disappointing, especially given its rather chunky size. There's plenty of room to slap in a huge battery and squeeze a couple of days juice out of it. Nokia's Lumia 800 put in a similarly poor effort when it first launched, but became considerably better after a software update. Fingers crossed Nokia does the same here -- and soon.
Power and performance
The Lumia 920 is running on a 1.5GHz dual core processor, backed up by 1GB of RAM. By top-end smart phone standards, that's not a lot. By comparison, the newly announced Google Nexus 4 boasts a 1.5GHz quad-core chip and a mighty 2GB of RAM. Given that Windows Phone 8 software finally allows for multi-core processing (up to a ridiculous 64 cores), it's a shame not to see the first quad-core Windows Phone 8 handset.
The fact remains it's only worth having four cores if you have software that can take advantage of them, and even in the 700,000 apps of the Google Play store, there's hardly anything that can properly take advantage of that processing. Instead, a nippy dual-core chip can provide plenty of grunt without taxing the battery too much.
Indeed, I found the 920 to be a perfectly capable phone. Swiping through the big, colourful tiles was responsive and immediate and opening menus and apps was free of any irritating delay. There's plenty of juice for all the Windows Phone 8 services and Nokia apps.
Whether it's powerful enough to cope with demanding apps and 3D games such as Real Racing 2 remains to be seen when -- or should that be if -- those games ever become available on the Windows Phone 8 store.
Camera
On the back of the 920 you'll spy an 8-megapixel camera. It apparently uses the PureView technology seen in the ridiculous Nokia 808, but it doesn't offer the same whopping megapixel count.
I took it for a wander with an iPhone 5 and I found the results to be satisfactory, but not mindblowing. The Lumia does a much better job with colour and toning, providing a warm, rich shot. The iPhone's effort seemed a little cold by comparison.
The Lumia 920 provided a warmer shot than the iPhone, but it didn't quite match it for clarity (click image to enlarge).
The iPhone 5's was clearer but colder (click image to enlarge).
It didn't, however, seem to offer quite the same clarity as the iPhone, which is particularly noticeable when viewing the photos at full screen. Fine detail around the buildings is lost, resulting in a less sharp image overall. It's not a bad effort though and I've certainly seen worse, but if it was able to combine clarity and colour then we'd finally have a phone to knock the iPhone's camera off its smug podium.
It does boast a load of extra features. Smart Photo takes multiple photos, allowing you to erase moving bits. Cinemagraph lets you create fun little animated gif images. The lens itself has optical image stabilisation to smooth out your video, which I found to work very well in my tests.
The Nokia Lumia 920, sunny side up, with a snapper that claims to capture more light than other camera phones.
I'll be doing a good deal more with the camera over the coming days, so stay tuned for a full teardown and comparisons against more of the competition.
4G connectivity
The 920 is the first phone from Nokia to ride on Britain's new super-fast 4G network. Only EE currently offers the service and it's not cheap -- and only in 11 cities at launch -- but if data speed is everything to you, it's worth checking out.
When I popped in my 4G SIM, the phone didn't seem to want to work on the 4G network. While annoying, both the service and the phone are brand new, so there are likely to be service updates pushed out to make them work together. If the same is true when the phone goes on sale, it will be a major problem.
With my Three SIM, I was only able to achieve 0.8Mbps download speed.
Although it's not activated on 4G, my EE SIM card achieved much faster download speeds.
On the plus side though, I did notice a distinct increase in data speeds. On my 3G SIM card from Three, I was only able to achieve download speeds of 0.8Mbps. With the EE SIM card installed, that rose dramatically to 4.1Mbps. As it's not on the 4G network, that could be just to do with having different signal strengths between networks, but it's still promising.
We'll be speed testing the 920 properly on 4G and of course seeing exactly how it affects battery life, so stay tuned for more.
Conclusion
The Windows Phone 8 experience on the 920 is the same as it is on the HTC 8X. It's fun and easy to use, but the terrible lack of apps in the store make it hard to recommend over similarly priced high-end Android phones such as the Samsung Galaxy S3.
Nokia's own local information, navigation and photography apps go some way to making up for the pitiful app selection. With a stunning screen, attractive design, decent camera and 4G connectivity, this is a superb phone and is rightfully the standard-bearer for Windows Phone 8. If the Windows Phone Marketplace can catch up to Android and iOS quickly, it'll be a formidable gadget.