We had been invited by Nokia to their Lumia 920 launch event, which thankfully was much more interesting than Microsoft’s Windows 8 launch.
Nokia has been struggling for the last few years, and many saw their Windows Phone exclusive strategy to be suicidal, of sorts. So far their Lumia’s have done fairly well, and after Jan 11, two new phones are finally retailing in India: the Lumia 920 and 820, with the 620 set for a February release.
We sat through some sales figures, some of which were interesting. Apparently, of the 185 million phones sold in India last year, 10% were smart phones. Nokia expects that number to go up to 10% in the next 3 years or so. Anyway, as far as phones are concerned, Nokia’s been putting good technology into them. They’ve been calling the 920 the “most innovative phone in the world”, and while that’s debatable, it is one of the most innovative.
On the OS side, all three new models have Windows Phone 8, and WP8 is backwards-compatible with WP7 apps. The Windows Store now has 120,000 apps, and Nokia claims that, of the top 50 Android and iOS apps, 46 are available for WP8.
But, lets look at what Nokia’s been doing on its own. It has decided to push imaging, entertainment and navigation as its three-pronged approach to get back to the game.
On the imaging side, they have their PureView technology, with features like good low light photography and Optical Image Stabilisation; both appear to work well, if the live demo we were shown was genuine (it seemed to be, at least). They’ve also got neat image processing features like mixing various frames to get a single desirable picture (Smart Shoot), or creating GIF images.
Then they’ve worked on the screen. They’re calling it an “HD+” display, due to its PureMotion technology. So while the display resolution is still 1280x768, they’ve done a few tricks on the hardware level to enable smoother scrolling and frame changes. Apparently, sunlight visibility is pretty good on the screen, and Nokia’s implemented “ClearBlack” tech into it. They’ve made the screen “Super Sensitive” and have made the touchscreen more responsive than earlier phones of theirs. Entertainment-wise they have stuff like Nokia Music, which, like Flipkart’s Flyte, offers DRM-free downloads and a larger selection of songs and albums. Navigation features include Nokia Maps and Nokia City lens, and Nokia seems to be pretty competitive with Google on this front. There are also extra features like wireless charging, which is a novelty and requires extra accessories.
Finally, the phones themselves: The Lumia 920 will sell for about `38,199; the 820 for `27,559; and the 620, will launch in Feb. No word on pricing there. Note that only the 920 has PureMotion, PureView and a built-in wireless charging shell (buy it separately for the 820); only the 820 has a microSD card slot, and the 620 only has 512MB of RAM.
Oh and, about the confusion over 4G: India doesn’t have LTE, and thus the 920 doesn’t support all 4G features; however, 4G isn’t even properly available here and whatever components of 3G exist that support higher bandwidths like HSPA+ and HSPDA are supported by these phones.