Nokia Lumia 820 - A Potential Brother Of The Hi-End Lumia 920

A potential brother of the hi-end Lumia 920, but we think the pricier Windows Phone 8 of Nokia deserves its price.

Lumia 820 is Nokia’s latest mid-segment model. It comes with AMOLED display, 4G connectivity and Microsoft’s newest OS, Windows Phone 8.

Nokia Lumia 820

The Lumia 820 is different from the hi-end Lumia 920. Instead of a convex and seamless screen of Lumia 920, it has a more conventional flat screen and the back lid, when opened, reveals battery, SIM tray and micro-SD cardslot. This is the first Windows Phone that we have seen coming with an extendable card memory. Lumia 920 really doesn’t need extra capacity thanks to its 32GB storage but Lumia 820 only has an integral 8GB storage.

With available 32GB micro-SDHC card costing below $21 and 16GB model costing $10.5, you don’t need to worry much about the little storage of Lumia 820. Installing memory card is a different matter, as removing the back lid requires carefulness.

Charger case

You can buy different cases for Lumia 820. The British version comes with a wireless charger case to use with Wireless Charging Plate of Nokia (DT-900RD, $82.5 from www.expansys.com), but there’re still more youthful and sturdier cases.

Lumia 820’s 4.3in screen is only smaller than 920’s 4½-in one, but it features 800x480pixel resolution, lower than 1280x768pixel. Separate pixel can be easily seen on Lumia 820 screen and texts are not as clear, but it is still impressive. As an AMOLED screen, it has deep blacks and vibrant colors, provided by the technology. Lumia 820’s AMOLED screen seem consuming less power than Lumia 920’s IPS screen, because Lumia 820 lasted 1.5h longer than Lumia 920 in our video-playback test. Unlike Lumia 920, Lumia 820’s screen is not made of Corning Gorilla Glass thus it is surely easy to get scratched.

With Windows Phone 8’s flexible interface, a lower-resolution screen doesn’t matter. Now you can resize Live Tiles of the OS, making them small, medium or large according to what info you want to display. Apps that don’t list any Live info, such as Internet Explorer, can be resized as small as possible, making room for Photos and People tiles that are full of your details.

People app was changed with an addition of Rooms. We talked about it, in detail, in the review of Lumia 920. In general, it allows you to create Rooms, add contacts to them then choose to share parts of info with people in that Room, for instance: message, dates, photos and to-do-lists.

You also can have Nokie’s whole excellent app suit, from Nokia’s free and large collection in Nokia Music to Drive (street guide app), and City Lens (a real-time map). They are all hi-quality apps, and thousands of songs free in Nokia Music will surely be popular.

Lumia 820 owns Snapdragon S4 chipset and 1.5GHz dual-core processor, like Lumia 920 does, plus it runs Windows Phone 8, which is amazingly nice, comparable to iOS with reference to fluency and performance. The phone finished SunSpider JavaScript in 915ms, thus it will face any difficulty in performance with hi-graphic web pages.

Nokia City Lens

Camera

Lumia 820’s camera has lower technical specs than Lumina 920’s one. What disappeared were PureView and optical stabilization, though you are not surely able to realize a decrease in quality from 8.7MP down to 8MP. We were extremely impressed with Lumia 920’s video-capturing which was very stable even when we were walking. When compared with Lumia 920’s one, Lumia 820’s video-capturing was slightly shaking, like from a common smartphone.

Indoor video recording also showed off Lumia 820’s weak performance, with lots of noise and less smoothness than Lumia 920’s one. Though Lumia 820’s was good, it was still at a lower level to the predecessor. Low-lit photos were not much impressive, with considerable noises and shaking.

Though we were impressed by Lumia 920’s film scenes, we weren’t persuaded by its daytime scenes which lacked details because of being over-processed. Lumia 820’s film scenes were less processed and sharper, but colors were a bit diluted. It was not bad yet it of course cannot rival the best, like Samsung Galaxy S3 or HTC Windows Phone 8X.

Lumia 820 is not comparable to our favorite Lumia 920. As the screen has lower resolution, but higher quality mean it won’t worry us in daily use. Lumia 820 also has better runtime and it costs $150 cheaper than Lumia 920. However, according to terms of contract, there’s only a few additional dollars, so unless you want to buy the whole smartphone, we recommend you to pay more $72 per year to buy the classier Lumia 920 featuring higher resolution.

Info ·         RRP: $570 ·         Website: www.phones4u.com   Technical specs ·         OS: Windows Mobile 8 ·         Clock rate: 1.5GHz ·         Number of core: 2 ·         RAM: 1GB ·         Mobile data: 4G ·         Screen: 4.3in 800x480pixel LCD ·         Camera: 8MP ·         Internal storage: 8GB ·         Card slot: micro-SD ·         Announced runtime: 14h (talk), 14 days (standby) ·         Size/weight: 69x124x10mm/160g ·         Test runtime: 8h 39min   Verdict ·         A potential brother of the hi-end Lumia 920, but we think the pricier Windows Phone 8 of Nokia deserves its price. ·         Ratings: 4/5