Nokia Lumia Icon Review

[Music] this is Lisa from mobile tech review and today we're gonna look at the Nokia Lumia icon now so first Lumia without a number after the name this one's exclusive to Verizon Wireless and it's pretty much everything we hoped from for the Lumia 1520 just a more manageable size package we're look at it now so this is the Nokia Lumia icon one of the few if any unnumbered Lumias that get a name instead why because Verizon Wireless likes giving things names and you know for better or worse it has a distinctive Verizon styling they seem to take all the Nokia phones and make them just a little bit more boxing all the Lumia phone so far have been very attractive things and this one well has straight sides as you saw I was just standing it up on its end and that makes it look a little bit thicker there's no taper here the way we'd see in other lumia it's not the end of the world this is available in your choice of black or white by the way now as we turn it over there's a little bit of a curve or a bulge there it's kind of subtle it kind of mirrors the curved glass on the front which is nice looking and that's just so they can make room for the 24 20 milliamp battery that's a pretty ample battery for a 5-inch smartphone and all the internals that are in here including a cutting-edge quad-core 2.2 gigahertz Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 CPU with 2 gigs of RAM that's the same specs you'd find on a flagship Android phone so that's pretty darn good Windows Phone used to lag behind not anymore like other flagship phones this sells for $1.99 on contract on Verizon Wireless it's exclusive to them worldwide well we see other variants for other carriers something in the similar vein I certainly hope so cuz a nice phone other than the kind of styling polycarbonate back metal frame all around you can feel it in fact in the winter the size are kind of cool it's interesting they're 20 megapixel PureView camera with dual LED flash you're looking at it basically the Nokia Lumia 1520 only shrunk down from 6 inches to a more manageable 5 inches I love the Nokia Lumia 1520 but even for me it was too much phone to handle so this this is kinda like the sweet spot 5 inches these days is considered your normal-sized phone just about full HD 1920 by 1080 display so you get more columns of icons on here and I like that more information and the windows lie Tyla experience running Windows Phone 8 here this is an AMOLED display so you get better than life colors basically very vivid colors and very rich blacks the whites aren't quite as wide and stay on an IPS display but good enough I think for most people it uses Nokia's clear black technology which basically means it's amylin you get rich blacks with that it works with gloves it has enhanced sensitivity there's no Nokia glance feature here I've really missed that it's kind of strange you go to settings and you look at where that would be and well it isn't there so when it's turned off it is turned off that's all there is to it it's actually very viewable outdoors to a Super AMOLED displays not so much AMOLED they can be Nokia puts a lot of importance on that and I think a lot of us do too you take your phone out outdoors you actually want to see who's calling don't you on the bottom we have our usual Windows Phone home button here our search button and our back button which does double duty for multitasking on the side you get a nice quality looking piece the black shows fingerprints a little bit but not as much as you would think but I like these they're kind of color-coordinated buttons here is your volume controls right here the power button in the middle is this typical Lumia phones and over here that's our dedicated camera button also functions as the shutter button Bonham has the micro USB port right here for data transfer and for charging little racing stripes here are in tennis stripes nothing going on on that side and up top dead center more racing stripes and then we have our 3.5 millimeter audio jack and a very fiddly SIM card slot here no little paper clip pokey you supposed to use a fingernail if you don't have much of a fingernail and good luck with that anyway inside there is a nano SIM card slot since this is a Verizon phone you're talking 4G LTE on Verizon Wireless and EVDO Rev a 3G in case you're not in a 4G coverage area and it also has gsm quad band inside for world roaming and that's unlocked and it also has 3G HSPA no no no LTE for GSM networks though inside we have Windows Phone 8 that's an operating system I like quite a lot as always you know the App Store E is weaker still on Windows Phone compared to that is the iPhone or Android but still I think that at this point most of the apps that people want are here The Weather Channel is here we've got even Instagram Facebook you've got all sorts of good stuff on here I think it's enough to keep most people entertained and Nokia includes all their great stuff you get Nokia here maps with transit directions they do very good mapping software also their lenses for their camera their special camera application itself Nokia cinemagraph Nokia Astoria teller there's a lot of good software that's built on board plus its windows so you get the basic PIM applications contacts calendar and you get office as well now this is a mobile version of office this is not office like you're gonna see on your desktop and we'll take a look at the sample file so you get an idea what you can do with it this is a PowerPoint presentation right here if you want to edit it tap there you can type change what it says right there it's pretty basic stuff for PowerPoint now if we take a look at the word document let's see a little bit fancier here they've got documents some colors and some pictures and if you want to do basic editing you can do that here I've selected a word so you can do things like pick a color bold italic cross through basic stuff right there and with excel sheet you need to get support for some minor formulas that sort of thing it's certainly enough for light editing on the go I think most people probably use their phones as viewers really rather than serious document composition products Verizon bundles a few applications they have NFL mobile on here that's been their deal what if you don't like something you can press and hold and delete it not just the live tile you can customize these change their size and move them around but any application that is here that Verizon is and if you don't want it tap and hold uninstall goodbye football the phone has 32 gigs of storage there is no microsd card slot here so that is what you get is about 26 gigs of album free use kenan has two gigs of ram dual band Wi-Fi a total Evan AC bluetooth 4.0 NFC and it has a GPS with GLONASS built in works good with the Nokia Maps and will take a look at those also if Nokia Drive and here's Nokia Maps and you can turn pio eyes on and off you can see is finding an awful lot of those so so we want to find out more about that it tells us what the name of the place is and how to get driving directions and Nokia here drive gives you a 3d view of the map with built-in turn-by-turn spoken navigation so cui isn't customizable really on Windows Phone by manufacturers or by carriers you're gonna look at the same dollar here that you went on other phones big easy to use you also have access to your recent calls for your contacts that sort of thing so how about call quality on this it was just ok it calls were intelligible but not as super super clear as Nokia's GSM phones that's what we found with this guy right here data speeds on the other hand we're pretty good we use the speedtest.net application cross-platform and data transfer speeds were typical for Verizon anywhere from 8 to 16 megabit download per second phone does have the mobile hotspot feature in case you want to use this as a wireless modem for your tablet or your laptop sounds is different from the Nokia Lumia 928 also available on Verizon it's a lot faster and the cameras a lot better on so that's what you're getting for your money here it's also I would say probably a little more stylish neither of these are maybe the best looking phones nokia has ever turned out but a bit more stylish but seriously faster and why does that matter Windows Phone runs nicely on lower end hardware because in the future when you want to get OS upgrades that Windows Phone 8.1 is going to be coming out this year and it is backward compatible with existing devices you know that's going to run fast on it also if you like to play 3d games and there's a decent selection here we have a lot of Xbox games and other games on here have asphalt 8 airborne on this and we'll test it out so we can see how it plays so we get raid array so right now we have volume descended about 50 percent the rear firing mono speaker not SuperDuper loud nice to see asphalt 8 is actually on here that's currently the latest version of asphalt available also on Android iOS for real racing there's thought the real racing - on Windows Phone real racing 3 not out yet [Applause] certainly very fluid nice looking graphics on this as always it's just a pretty game plays very nicely and as as fast as any phone on the market it should now how about web browsing you get ie mobile here everything has to use the IE engine so it's not like Android we can get very very different web browsers if you want some more like iOS in that respect and you can see what the on-screen keyboard looks like you have to switch the numbers and symbols tap to go back program always a good keyboard well designed so it seems like you're always just hanging the key that you intended to hit and there were loading our website mobile tech review and we're using Verizon's network not Wi-Fi to do that nice and quick the whites are pretty darn white on this it's very nice looking display pinch zooming very fast the latest version of ie for Windows Phone 8 is quite good now how about if we want to watch a video how about the LG G flex video see how that plays so the html5 video of course not flash and for YouTube there is no Microsoft dedicated YouTube client probably because Microsoft and Google just don't get along real well for obvious reasons but there's a third-party YouTube application that's very good that you can download for free [Music] looks great frame rates are excellent again still doing this over Verizon's ltu network so it's nice that it plays inline in full-screen just like that very fluently and now for the star of the show that's Nokia's peer reviewed point twenty megapixel camera that we've got here backside illuminated sensor fast carl zeiss f 2.4 lens can shoot 1080p video in a couple of different frame rates and it can also shoot in d ng that's digital RAW format which is pretty darn cool for you enthusiastic refer types since this a peer of your camera what it does it shoots a five megapixel and a nineteen megapixel image so you gets a lower resolution image to work with if you want to say you know send it to somebody be an email you don't really want a super high resolution fat file and you've got the 19 megapixel as your reference larger image it does the same thing as other nokia cameras the zoom isn't really destructive because what they do is they use the 19 megapixels as the over sample size and then if you're using the 5 megapixel is your actual output you've got all these extra pixels to work with on it so what is really doing is cropping rather than doing a digital zoom is it it's guys the Nokia Lumia 1020 camera no it's not of course that the 41 megapixel camera is just to die for it is very good and just as good as a Nokia Lumia 1520 that uses the same setup here really it's one of the best camera phones on the market so here we have a picture that took very high contrast setting lots of Sun coming in through the window hitting on the white sections of the cat it did use the flash that properly expose things but we hardly ever see that level of detail honestly when we try to shoot that particular shot even with regular dedicated cameras outdoor shot very detailed very nice colors here pretty accurate in the cause it handles exposure very well once again we don't have any whiteout on the water you can see the ripples and the detail it looks natural but not over sharpened if anything nokia avoids that digital / sharpening they leave it up to you to use Photoshop or whatever image editor you want to sharpen things up if you feel that's necessary and lastly an image taken in shade still looks quite good colors are pretty accurate these rocks here and some cameras tend to really white out then that hasn't happened and you can see the detail in the lava rocks they're really really nice I mean this is a good camera likewise video is also quite pleasing on the camera now let's see how it actually does if you want to shoot a photo and we have our friend the bastoy there and this is Nokia's camera application and right here you can see you can switch between video shooting camera shooting burst shooting and here's white balance on is AO all sorts of settings are available here you have quick access to the reframe functionality there into the last picture you've taken and even more settings you can choose which Nokia lenses you might want to use use a timer - bracketing switches the other camera so one thing that Lumias have not been really quick at is focusing so let's say the tap to focus was pretty good will change our angle a little bit go impossibly close almost for it to focus but still managing and let's just hit that and let it focus so it's definitely gone a lot quicker the processor helps but it's also a little quicker than the 1520 that's running on a very fast CPU so Nokia is just getting faster at this is it the best for sports photography in good lighting it's not bad if you're an indoor lighting that's not so great it's still not the fastest to focus but it's getting better so I was mentioned 24 20 milliamp per hour battery sealed inside as usual lithium-ion polymer works with Qi wireless charging so that's pretty cool you not to need buy a special back for this guy if you have a cheap arles charging platform it's just going to work battery life that's a pretty ample battery there we have no trouble making it through the day and that's hitting it pretty heavily using it for a GPS navigation section to the store shooting some photos and videos playing a few YouTube videos playing music in the background using the Xbox music player which is a very pleasant experience testing out some what I did notice is if you play a lot of games obviously battery life is gonna be shorter this is true of all phones all computers gets a little bit warm at the bottom over here you're not gonna burn yourself also if you're shooting lots of photos and videos this higher megapixel camera here is just gonna use up more battery power so if you're real shutterbug you're gonna get shorter battery life but you should still make it through the entire day in the charge because even with my moderate to heavy use by the end of the day I still have 30% available as you can tell from the angle of our shot here viewing angles are good on this display quite good in fact 441 ppi pixel density so that's one of the sharpest phones on the market you're not going to see individual pixels I don't care how good your eyes are this is Gorilla Glass 3 so nice to know especially because it is a curved glass where the glass sticks out a little bit if you drop it face down the glass will most assuredly be the thing that hits the ground in terms of cross-platform benchmarks there really aren't many that include Windows Phone but obviously top the line processor here as fast as anything Android has to offer and one test that is cross-platform is the SunSpider JavaScript test where it's scored 544 milliseconds where lower numbers are better says up there with the top Android phones and tablets still a little bit higher than iOS the iPhone 5s but very very fast honestly you're not going to be wanting for speed on this device there's no lag anywhere so that's the Nokia Lumia icon available now exclusively on Verizon Wireless in the United States hopefully we'll see something like this coming to other carriers and other countries soon and certainly is one of the nicest windows phones yet I'm Lisa from Bubble tech review be sure to visit our website for the full review and don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel

Channel: MobileTechReview

Views: 94,643

Rating: 4.8780489 out of 5

Keywords: Nokia Lumia Icon review, Windows Phone 8 smartphone review, Lumia Windows 8 phone review, Verizon Windows phone review, Nokia HERE, 20mp camera, Nokia PureView camera, Nokia Lumia (Product Line), Nokia (Business Operation), Windows 8 (Operating System)

Id: PKCwL4lfyRM

Length: 16min 39sec (999 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 26 2014