Nokia Lumia 920 Windows Phone 8 Review

Name: Nokia Lumia 920
Brand: Nokia

by Ray Willington — Thursday, November 29, 2012, 11:00 AM EDT

Performance: Display, Camera, and Battery Life

Page 4: Performance: Display, Camera, and Battery Life

When we tested the Lumia 900 in April, we saw it notch fairly impressive scores with a single-core 1.4GHz processor and 512MB of RAM. While the Snapdragon within the Lumia 920 is only clocked at 1.5GHz (and paired to 1GB of RAM), the scores we witnessed here place the Lumia 920 on an entirely different level. It's tough to even compare the two, and it's clear that this breed of Windows Phone products are built to handle the most complex software being cranked out by developers.

In our experience, we never noticed a hiccup. Even with live tiles scattered about, 10+ apps in rotation, and 5-6 programs receiving push updates, we never witnessed an OS hesitation. Windows Phone 8 as it is represented on the Lumia 920 is slick and speedy.

Lumia 920 Camera Samples

The 8MP rear camera is on par with, if not outright superior, to the sensors found in high-end Android devices. The Auto-Fix is a nice feature, and there are quite a few Instagram-like apps for those looking to edit shots right on their phone.

Battery Life Comparisons with WP Bench

Details: Search 'WP Bench' in Marketplace

Nokia stuffs a 2000mAh battery in this phone. That's slightly larger than the battery in the Lumia 900, but in our testing, we found it to not be large enough. In a normal day -- surfing the Web, making a few calls, sending 10 to 20 texts, checking in on Foursquare and just generally keeping tabs on the world -- we managed to squeeze around 10 hours out of the device. This is with quite a bit of screen and data usage, too. Average users should easily get a few more hours out of it. The battery isn't user-replaceable, so you'll need a USB port somewhere to charge it up if you start running low.

We also utilized WP Bench's Battery test, obviously to test the Nokia Lumia 920's battery life, which keeps the screen on and loops a CPU intensive task in the background.

The numbers here speak for themselves. Nokia's Lumia 920's "worst case scenario" battery life is the lowest of the bunch, though to be fair, all of the rivals ran Windows Phone 7 and utilized a single-core processor -- which obviously drains less power. Still, we never were thrilled with the battery life on the 920. Given how huge it is, we expected more in terms of longevity.