The Lumia 920 is a new WP8 top-tier model and is aimed at the most demanding users. It is also the more expensive and powerful of the two presented. The Lunia 920 has a 4.5-inch IPS matrix display, with a resolution of 768x1280 which of course supports multi touch. Nokia is also very proud to present their ClearBlack and PureMotion HD+ technologies that make WP8 icons magically sparkle on a black background. Nokia also presented an 8.7Mpix camera with PureView technology. The way that PureView works is that you have every pixel of photo/video combined from seven pixels on the sensor. The technology then takes the average results and removes any deviations. The device supports tons of new technologies like Bluetooth, GPS, LTE, WWAN standards, NFC and surprisingly wireless charging. There is also City Lens that can be imported into old Lumias. This is a technology that turns the view from the camera into an augmented reality scene with directions, points of interest and other handy stuff if you need some guidance in new places. You also get the new Start Screen with squares of different colors and sizes, as you have probably seen on most of Windows 8 series of products. Nokia is finally adding in screenshots in this and future products. The software behaved very stable and fluid during the presentation so we can expect that final version is very close.
In the end I am not sure if Nokia presented enough, I mean the Lumia 920 is certainly a beast and probably the best device Nokia made in the last few years, but they didn’t provide information about price, not even in what price range will it be. More frustrating than that, they didn’t announce the date when customers can expect the device to be available for purchase; they only stated that it will be in the 4th quarter of this year. If you consider that iPhone 5 will be launched in a few days and it will be available probably a week after presentation, this just seems like a huge step in a wrong direction from Nokia, but hopefully for them WP8 could do the work and save them.
[Ed – Nokia also had to admit that the video used for the PureView demo was not shot using a PureView camera and more specifically not the one on the 920. It does put egg on their faces, although we did not draw the conclusion that it was meant to say it was shot on the 920 in the first place. Nokia was smart to admit this though as many in the press have jumped on it to try and take away from the launch. The pricing and official launch dates were missing for a variety of reasons including waiting to see what Apple does on the 12th of September, but it would have been nice to have more information than what was shown. Nokia and Windows Phone are at a critical juncture here, unfortunately Microsoft has also tied Windows 8 and Windows RT to its fate as well which unfortunately means that WP8 needs to have at least some commercial success against Android and Apple’s iPhone… we are not entirely sure that it can be done at this stage of the game]
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