Nokia Lumia 920 review:

Windows Phone's most powerful handset yet

                              

The good: The Nokia Lumia 920 forges new Windows Phone ground with wireless charging support and a highly sensitive screen you can use with gloves. Moreover, Nokia helps fill in Windows Phone OS gaps with a few missing features.

The bad: A thick, heavy build and slippery finish for some colors make the Lumia 920 harder to hold and carry, and the phone's overhyped camera doesn't have enough settings.

The bottom line: Nokia's Lumia 920 is heavy and thick, but if you want the most powerful, feature-rich Windows phone available, this is it.

AT&T's Nokia Lumia 920 isn't for wimps. It's big, it's heavy, and it takes a power user to truly appreciate the phone's special features. If you open your heart and expand your pockets, the Lumia 920's smooth, streamlined design beautifully showcases all that the just-launchedWindows Phone 8 OS has to offer. Beyond that, a glove-friendly screen, wireless charging, cached music, and turn-by-turn directions take the Lumia 920 a step further than Windows Phone can achieve on its own, bringing you the roundest, fullest Windows Phone experience that money can buy.

Just because the Lumia 920 is bigger, doesn't mean that it's better for everyone. Not all AT&T customers who can choose between the Lumia 920 and the HTC Windows Phone 8X -- or even pick among the iPhone 5 or an Android phone or two -- will go Nokia. However, for $99, I would.

The specs are strong, but not everyone feels they need 32GB of memory over 16GB, and if you believe Nokia's trumpeting message about its advanced camera, you could find yourself mildly disappointed. The Lumia 920's chief high-end Windows Phone rival, the Windows Phone 8X, is lighter, handles better, and spans three carriers to the Lumia 920's single provider. You'll be able to find a comparison between the 8X and the Lumia 920 here.

Editors' note: The Lumia 920 rating has been lowered due to changes in the competitive marketplace.

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Design and build Slightly larger and significantly heavier than its predecessor, the Lumia 920 could do some serious damage if you were to catch it in the jaw. With its consistent 0.4-inch thickness throughout the polycarbonate unibody, the Lumia 920 has presence. And gravity; 6.5 ounces of gravity, to be exact. As such, it's a handset you notice when you drop it in your purse, shove it into a pocket, and casually lift it off a tabletop.

The 920 retains the Lumia 900's perfectly flat top and bottom, round spines, and distinct 90-degree angles around the face. On the plus side, its curvier back gives it a more comfortable palm feel than the Lumia 900's mostly straight plane. Yet its girth makes it a bulkier back-pocket companion than I prefer. I usually desensitize to the phones I carry around in my jeans, but the Lumia 920 never let me forget.

Although the two Lumias are clearly cut from the same cloth, there are differences. The Lumia 920 is 0.1 inch taller (5.1 inches) and 0.1 inch wider (2.8 inches) than the 900, its side buttons are slightly redesigned and repositioned, and the Micro-USB charger moves from the top to the 920's base, while also adding two small screws. The camera and flash also drop a few millimeters on the back.

Nokia's Lumia 920 is sculpted, but also heavy and bulky.

If you're really into staring at details, you'll note that the Lumia 920's screen ditches the 900's raised ridges, which made the predecessor feel like it was slapped onto a polycarbonate slab rather than sculpted altogether. In the 920, the screen is a smooth, seamless part of the phone.

The white version I tested has a high-gloss plastic finish that's slippery to the touch. In fact, when CNET Editor in Chief Lindsey Turrentine picked up the phone, it immediately slipped through her fingers and dropped back onto my desk. The yellow and red models also receive this shiny treatment, but cyan and black get a matte finish, just like the Lumia 900.

The side buttons rise above the surface and are easy to find and press by feel.

Are you ready to move on to the screen yet? So am I. The Lumia 920's HD screen has a 1,280x768-pixel resolution (WXGA) with a pixel density of 332 pixels per inch. When Nokia first announced the Lumia 920, it could claim that it offered the highest pixel density in the biz. That's no longer true. HTC's Windows Phone 8X has a slightly smaller display and a higher 342 ppi.

In the end, both phones are pixel-rich and besides which, pixel density isn't the end-all, be-all in screen quality. All you really need to know is that the Lumia 920's screen looks terrific at multiple brightness levels: deep blacks, rich colors, bright whites, sharp text.

The Lumia 920 (white) tweaks the Lumia 900's design.

This time, Nokia sets aside the 900's AMOLED technology to give the Lumia 920 a modified 4.5-inch IPS LCD display. Nokia calls it "PureMotion+ HD," and you should pay attention because it can do a few things. First, if you set screen sensitivity to high, you can navigate around using a fingernail and even gloves; which means frigid winter fingers can stay wrapped in their cozy cocoons. And yes, I did test this on many other smartphone screens, including on the iPhone 5 and Samsung Galaxy Note 2, and they don't respond to anything except a warm, conductive fingertip.

Second, the screen can automatically brighten when you go outdoors in bright light, a move that does require a greater battery contribution. The phone tops out at 600 nits of luminance. Weather conditions didn't let me test this, but the screen did seem to reduce outdoor glare compared with the screens on some other handsets, so I count that as a win for readability.

Yeah, yeah, I know my gloves make me look like a muppet, but I've never been able to navigate like this on any other touch-screen phone.

Third, the "Motion" aspect in the PureMotion name refers to delivering smooth videos and graphics free of ghosting, blurring, and lags. I don't see much of that on premium smartphones, and I didn't witness it here, either.

Wireless charging Nokia gets props for baking wireless charging capabilities into it Windows Phone 8 Lumias (the 820 series can get it, too). Others have trod this road before with varying success, mostly because their products didn't catch on. Nokia's at least trying to throw momentum behind the effort by seeding wireless charging pads in select Virgin Atlantic lounges and Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf shops.

The wireless charging dongle charges phones fairly quickly and eliminates where's-my-charger anxiety.

I started out skeptical that wireless charging would be as effective as conventional wall charging. I've used inductive chargers that also apply the Qi (pronounced "chee") standard, and because they involved a charging case, it just seemed like a pointless extra step. Since the Lumia 920 requires no extra case, I'm much warmer to the idea.

The wireless charging pad has no internal battery, so you never fully escape the wires. You still have to plug something in. However, the benefit of a charging pad is that you can hide the wires, say behind the computer monitor at your desk, or on a countertop in your home. The charging pad will only draw a charge when you set down your phone. The result is a set-it-and-forget-it situation where you can drop the phone on the charging pad without rummaging around for chargers or taking the time to plug and unplug cable.

A pad also offers a much more finished surface if you can manage to hide the wires: a smooth oval or some other accessory that just looks like another tech item, rather than part of your cord jungle. The charging pad needn't be a "pad," either. Any electronic that uses the Qi standard will do, like the JBL-made charging speaker that Nokia is helping show off, or one day an addition to your car console. Some charging stands will also automatically throw the phone into docking mode, which will automatically surface some apps.

Accessories like this Fatboy pouch give wireless charging a different look and feel.

The implementation I look forward to most is a superjuiced charging pad that can efficiently charge multiple phones on the same pad. Plug in one, power two.

Back in reality, I wanted to see how fast the phone would charge. Using wireless charging, the battery gained 43 percent more charge in an hour and 15 minutes. By comparison, the wall charger gave me 63 percent charge in an hour and 44 minutes. The wall charger is more efficient, but the wireless charger didn't lag too far behind. I'll continue testing wireless charging beyond this initial review.

OS and apps To recap, the operating system comes with the NFC features Tap + Send to share content, a wallet, Kid's Corner, resizable live tiles and new colors, camera "lenses," Office 2013, and cloud content-syncing to another Windows 8 device. The OS update brings so many new features, we had to give it its own Windows Phone 8 review.

Windows Phone 8 brings you a separate profile for your kids, among many other things.

Yet Windows Phone has a few absences, like default voice navigation, panorama camera mode, and some top apps and premium mobile experiences.

Nokia steps in to solve at least one of these, adding a few other tidbits to enhance stock Windows Phone. Nokia Drive is the most useful, with turn-by-turn voice directions. Now keep in mind that Windows Phone 8 will let you link to third-party apps for voice nav, but in the Lumia 920, Nokia's app drops it right in there for you.

Nokia Music lets you cache music for offline listening.

I also like seeing Nokia Music, which is known for for its curated music mix stations, and for music caching. You can save up to five playlists with 50 tunes each to your phone storage for offline listening. For free. Windows Phone offers SmartDJ through its Xbox Music service, but caching is a boon for long trips and commutes.

Nokia City Lens, an augmented-reality app, is another addition, but in my opinion, it's the least successful. Hold it up to see nearby businesses, landmarks, and happenings. Or in my case, hold it up to see multiple suggestions for restaurants that have been shuttered for years. The problem with relying on other company's databases like TripAdvisor is that you inherit the problems of verifying what's actually around.

Nokia City Lens' augmented reality app isn't too useful when suggesting establishments that no longer exist.

The Lumia 920 adds an equalizer and Dolby boosting if you've got the option switched on and a pair of headphones plugged in. I listened to songs on various equalizer settings and toggled the Dolby-boosted playback switch on and off. I could definitely hear a boost with some songs and some settings, but other times I couldn't discern much of a difference.

Camera and video
Nokia boasts a very high-resolution 8.7-megapixel camera that uses Carl Zeiss optics, springs for stabilizing images, and most importantly, the PureView algorithms introduced in the Nokia 808 PureView, with its enormous 41-megapixel sensor and lens.

Nokia boasts an 8.7-megapixel camera, PureView rendering algorithms, and great low-light shots.

Here are my observations as a casual photographer. The first thing you'll need to know is that Nokia defines "PureView" as the rendering software, not as the camera sensor size. However, the 8.7-megapixel module is larger than most, and in that sense it gets a head start when letting in light. The Lumia 920 has photographs in a 16:9 ratio and has a 26 millimeter focal length.

Photo settings are sparse in the Nokia Lumia 920, paling in comparison to controls on the Nokia 808 PureView.

Image quality was pretty good most of the time. Shots were largely consistent; while some photos looked crisper and higher contrast on other phones, only one picture out-and-out bombed (a sun flare overtook the entire image). The Lumia 920 produced colorful images with crisp lines, but I did notice that at least once the image looked clearer and better-defined through the viewfinder than it did post-rendering. Colors weren't always 100 percent natural; the 920 enhanced pinks in some shots, and like the Lumia 900 before it, often added a blue tint.

Revelers welcome the San Francisco Giants home after their World Series sweep.

The iPhone 5 outperformed the 920 in a few notable pictures, like a close-up of a flower, and the HTC Windows Phone 8X captured some screens with sharper contrast and lines. You'll want to see photos in my camera shootout versus the HTC Windows Phone 8X and iPhone 5 to see for yourself.

Selling Giants gear near the parade route.

True to Nokia's promise, the Lumia 920 pulled a lot of color and definition from low-light shots. The camera achieves this by turning on the flash, metering, then turning off the flash to take the picture. It takes longer this way, so a little patience is necessary.

Strangely, this image looked sharper before I took the picture. I retook it three times to make sure I wasn't seeing things.

While we're on the topic of speed, Windows Phone OS doesn't prioritize shot-to-shot time the same way that other OSes do with their burst modes. One of the reasons is that Windows Phone uses touch-focus when you tap the screen, then takes the shot as part of that action. You can also focus by pressing down on the physical shutter button halfway, then pressing again to take the picture. Unfocused, shot-to-shot time is fast, but will give you blurry photos. I'm personally a fan of continuous autofocus.

This low-light photo came out the best on the Lumia 920. I also took it on the iPhone 5 and on the HTC Windows Phone 8X.

One main issue I had was a much more limited choice of camera settings than with other cameras, even other Windows phones like the HTC Windows Phone 8X. This 920 gives you a choice of scenes, even two to handle backlit scenarios and nighttime portraits. You can select an ISO setting, white-balance presets, exposure value, aspect, ratio, and a focus-assist light. And that's it. There are no choices for sharpness or saturation, no effects, and no dropping down to a smaller resolution. I'd also have hoped that Nokia would take the opportunity to introduce panorama mode, a popular Android and iPhone feature.

The Lumia 920 takes aim at another nighttime statue, this landmark by artist Keith Haring.

The Lumia 920's 1-megapixel front-facing camera doesn't take stellar shots, but the self-portrait I snapped was passable, and it's certainly good enough for video chatting.

Video on the 920 looked great. Colors were natural, and the 1080p HD picture was crisp and smooth at 30 frames per second. My voice did sound more echoey than usual, though, and subjects' voices were harder to hear until I raised the volume. Luckily, video settings have continuous focus turned on by default, though video quality is set to 720p HD unless you switch it to 1080p. White balance is your only other video settings option.

The Nokia Lumia 920 produced a balanced, accurate, and sharp shot of CNET's studio.

Performance
The Lumia 920 comes with AT&T's 4G LTE. My data connection was strong, and content streamed quickly during testing, consistently riding in the high teens for downlink. I used two diagnostic apps, Free Speed Test and my SpeedTest. Results are much harder to read on the latter, which also switches the upload and download results and lists them in kilobits rather than megabits.

Both the Free Speed Test (left) and my SpeedTest showed fast download speeds over LTE.

I also ran the Lumia 920 through a gamut of performance tests to see how fast it boots and completes certain tasks. Since there's no official CNET app yet for Windows Phone OS, I substituted the Endomondo app and the speed test app, just as I did on the HTC Windows Phone 8X.

Download Endomondo app (3MB)	25 seconds
CNET mobile site load	4 seconds
CNET desktop site load	14 seconds
Boot time to lock screen	35 seconds
Camera boot time	2 seconds
Camera, shot-to-shot time	1.5-2 seconds with flash and autofocus; 1.5 seconds, no flash, no auto-focus
Load up app (mySpeedTest)	3 seconds

The Lumia 920 comes with an embedded 2,000mAh battery that you won't be able to remove on your own. Nokia rates battery life at 9 hours talk time and 13.3 days of standby time over 3G. Nokia also rates music playback at 52 hours, with 5 hours of video playback. Battery tests continue; I'll update this section with details from our lab tests.

According to FCC radiation tests, the Lumia 920 has a digital SAR of 1.08 watt per kilogram.

Call quality
I tested the Nokia Lumia 920 in San Francisco on AT&T's network (GSM 850/900/1800/1900; LTE 700/1700/2100). On my end, call quality impressed. Volume was strong on the medium-high setting (7/10), and absent of any background noise and interference. Voices sounded natural and easy to understand. The only deviations I really noticed were small distortions while my test partner spoke, but those were infrequent and brief.

Call quality took a dive by the time it got to my test partner's landline. He declared the audio somewhat distorted, a little muffled, and, worst of all, flat. High frequencies cut off, making my voice overprocessed, he said, with an unpleasant quality. That aside, I was intelligible, and there was no white noise.

Nokia Lumia 920 call quality sample Listen now:

At waist level, the Lumia 920's speakerphone immediately dropped a few volume levels, so I bumped it back up. Although not as high-quality as the standard cellular mode, this wasn't a bad speakerphone experience at all. It was very slightly muffled, but there was no background noise or blips, and echo wasn't too bad. While I've heard better, there wasn't really any glaring detraction I could point out. I'd call the experience a success.

Once again, voices came through clearer on my end than on my tester's landline. Volume dropped for him, but was still OK. Call quality went from bleh to worse, he said, when you threw in the room echo and a little more distortion.

How it compares with the HTC Windows Phone 8X

HTC's Windows Phone 8X (blue) is lighter than Nokia's Lumia 920.

Both phones are worth buying, but even if you overlook the Lumia 920's $99 cost versus the 8X's $199 initial price tag, there are trade-offs. HTC's 8X device has a slightly smaller screen, but it's lighter, much more portable, and handles better than the clunkier Lumia 920. Yet the Lumia 920 has the advantage of wireless charging from the get-go. There are rumors that Verizon's version of the 8X will get it, too, but if the capability is built into the unibody phone, HTC hasn't turned it on yet.

The Nokia Lumia 920 (top) is uniformly thicker than the tapering HTC Windows Phone 8X (bottom.)

The Lumia's advantages come in custom apps that bring turn-by-turn voice navigation and music caching for offline listening. It also has 32GB, double the 8X's 16GB capacity, and you can use it in cold weather without removing your gloves. The 8X did take some better shots with its camera than the Lumia 920, but the 8X gives you far more editing options in its add-on editor app. On the whole, I found Nokia's camera app more consistent across the range of lighting scenarios, and I like that the 920's camera doesn't default you to 6 megapixels as the 8X does.

From left to right, the Windows Phone 8X and Lumia 920 side by side.

If AT&T is out of the question, the choice is easy since the 8X is coming to Verizon and T-Mobile as well. For AT&T customers, I say buy the Lumia 920. It's more powerful and is half the price. However, if cost isn't a factor, size and weight are, since the phones' many other specs are so similar: LTE, high-res camera, identical processor, and large, HD screen.

Head over to my more-detailed comparison between the two phones if you're looking for a spec-to-spec showdown.

Who should buy it?
The Nokia Lumia 920 is a good all-around smartphone, but because of its size and weight, I wouldn't recommend it for everyone. There is no one broken, terrible, or unfinished feature to push you away, and innovations like Wi-Fi charging and gloved use are unique draws that no other competitor can offer. The Windows Phone OS, however, brings some trade-offs for those who are also considering Android and iOS.

Buy the Lumia 920 if you:
- Like Windows Phone 8's big, bold interface
- Enjoy a large, clear screen
- Rely on turn-by-turn voice navigation
- Need 32GB storage
- Want to dive into wireless charging
- Often wear gloves
- Take a lot of low-light photos
- Want to seamlessly sync with Windows 8
- Own an Xbox

Skip the Lumia 920 if you:
- Prefer a light phone
- Want a mountain of apps and games at the ready
- Seek granular photo control
- Rely on voice dictation for composing e-mail and notes
- Live in Google's or Apple's app ecosystem

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