Nokia Lumia 820 review

Key Features: Dual-core 1.5GHz Snapdragon Krait CPU; 1GB RAM; 8GB internal memory, expandable; 4.3-inch 480 x 800 pixel AMOLED screen; Windows Phone 8 OS; 4G version available

Manufacturer: Nokia

Nokia Lumia 820 - Design and Features

Introduction

Nokia’s Windows Phone 8 line-up for 2013 has three star attractions. The Nokia Lumia 820 is the middleweight model. It has a 4.3-inch screen, dual-core 1.5GHz processor and 8-megapixel camera. These respectable specs sit fairly happily alongside the £349.99 pre-pay price, but a disappointing screen means it’s a far less competitive package than either the great value Nokia Lumia 620 or the camera-centric Nokia Lumia 920.

Nokia Lumia 820 – Design

Nokia offers some of the most colourful phones out there, and the Nokia Lumia 820 is no different. Seven bold shades of rear covers are available for the handset, offering a much brighter look than something like the Samsung Galaxy S3.

Unlike the top-end Nokia Lumia 920, though, this is not a true unibody phone. The rear cover curves around smoothly to the screen surround, eliminating any seams that might otherwise rest under your fingers, but the rear plate is removable.

Nokia has done its best to make the Nokia Lumia 820 feel as much like a unibody phone as possible, though. The battery cover is almost flex-free when in position and is very tricky to remove. Tricky, that is, until you learn the nack of wedging a fingernail under each front corner. Try another way and it’s impressively stubborn – so stubborn that Nokia has made a video explaining how to do it.

The main benefit of a removable battery cover is that it lets Nokia incorporate a memory card slot without ruining the phone’s curves. This is an important feature in the Nokia Lumia 820, as it only has 8GB of internal memory.  You’ll find both the microSD memory card slot and the microSIM slot underneath the battery which you can easily swap out for a spare if you fancy.

Functional as it is, the Nokia Lumia 820 is the least aesthetically successful of the new Lumia range. The glossy finish of our review sample, the phone’s boxy appearance and the way that the battery cover blooms out from the phone’s sides – none are style blunders, but they add up to a phone that’s neither as striking as the Nokia Lumia 920, or as cute as the Lumia 620. 

Like its siblings, it’s a fairly chunky phone. At 10mm thick and 160g in weight, it won’t challenge any slimness-obsessed phones like the Motorola Razr i. However, unlike the Lumia 920, its weight isn't the first thing you notice.

The Nokia Lumia 820 also matches its Lumia brothers in terms of sockets and hardware buttons. The microUSB charge/data transfer port sits on the bottom, and the 3.5mm headphone jack up top. Nothing amiss there.

The Nokia Lumia 820’s buttons are a little more unusual, though. Windows Phone 8 phones all have hardware camera buttons, and the Nokia Lumia 820’s sits alongside the volume rocker and power button on the right edge of the phone. The power button is designed to sit snugly under your thumb, to let you easily put the phone into standby.

The three soft nav keys below the screen are also a Windows requirement. They light up when required and are decked out with 100 per cent inoffensive standard Windows icons. Some parts of a phone are better left without a stamp of personality.

Nokia Lumia 820 – Features

For a mid-range phone, the Nokia Lumia 820 is impressively future-proofed features-wise. Aside from the wireless standards of HSPA 3G, Bluetooth and GPS, the Nokia Lumia 820 also offers NFC and 4G (3G-only options are available).

NFC stands for Near-Field Communication, a nascent wireless payments standard and a way to transfer any kind of data-light information between phones and other devices. 4G is, of course, the successor to 3G. It’s much faster, offering real-world usage speeds of around 40Mbps. Only EE offers 4G in the UK at present, though, and it doesn’t come cheap. The cheapest contract that gets you the phone for free costs £36 a month.

Windows Phone 8 also lets the Nokia Lumia 820 share its mobile internet connection with other devices over Wi-Fi, although you’d better check your carrier allows this before doing so.

Nokia Lumia 820 - Screen, Windows Phone 8 and Apps

Nokia Lumia 820 – Screen

Screen technology is one area of mobile phones that has developed rapidly over the last twelve months. “Retina” style screens so pixel-packed that images are as sharp as a switchblade are now common. However, the Nokia Lumia 820 screen benefits from none of these advancements. Its screen is downright disappointing, a serious let-down.

The Nokia Lumia 820 has a 800 x 480 pixel AMOLED display, 4.3 inches across. Although it doesn’t use the PenTile subpixel matrix found in many OLED devices, which causes fuzziness in text, clarity and sharpness throughout is poorer than Android rivals at the price. A year ago when the similar Nokia Lumia 900 arrived, this level of clarity was borderline acceptable – now not so much. Even Windows Phone 8’s careful rendering of text can’t hide the effects of the lowly resolution.

Its screen also suffers from the issue we find in many OLED-screened devices. The Nokia Lumia 820’s colours are oversaturated, to the point that bright colours appear to blur into each other a little. Using a background of red Live Tiles, the screen was a little too much to take – we went as far as reverting to brown Tiles to tone the phone down.

Nokia appears to be moving away from using OLED screens too, perhaps in part because of this oversaturation issue, having adopted an IPS display in the flagship Nokia Lumia 920.

The screen also demonstrates one of the Nokia Lumia 820’s few serious build quality issues. This phone does not use Gorilla Glass, and it shows. There’s a slight flex to the screen, and if you put moderate pressure on the centre of the display, the top layer squishes down onto the one below it, causing a form of screen distortion and an unnerving click.

The Nokia Lumia 820 screen does have its benefits, though. Contrast is flawless, with the perfect black levels you’d expect from an OLED display, and the polariser layer that’s part of the Nokia ClearBlack screen initiative keeps screen reflections at a minimum. Top brightness is excellent too, so you should have no trouble using the phone outdoors.

Nokia Lumia 820 – Windows Phone 8 and Performance

The Nokia Lumia 820 runs Windows Phone 8, Microsoft’s mobile OS. After a slow start, Windows Phone has become a full and feature-rich operating system. However, if you’re familiar with its predecessor, Windows Phone 7, you will find this latest version similar.

The main homescreen of the Nokia Lumia 820 is a vertically-scrolling array of what Microsoft calls Live Tiles. These are sharp-looking squares (or rectangles) that act as links to apps, while also showing the odd bit of info themselves – such as how many new emails you have. Windows Phone 8 adds the ability to create extra-small tiles, letting you fit up to 24 tiles on a single screen – previous versions did not let you be so space-efficient.

The key selling point of Windows Phone 8 is that it looks and feels incredibly slick. Made as a closed system that, like iOS, focuses on quality of experience rather than flexibility, Windows Phone 8 performance is superb, with barely any lag throughout. Lower-cost Windows devices tend to suffer from a bit of load time as apps fire-up, but this too is minimised in the Nokia Lumia 820. It has a powerful dual-core 1.5GHz Krait CPU with 1GB of RAM, matching the spec of the top-end Lumia 920.

Nokia Lumia 820 – People, Nokia Maps and Office

In its development from Windows Phone 7 to Windows Phone 8, the system has lost none of its smooth moves, and slowly gained a bunch of useful features. These days, it’s fairly competitive with rivals Android and iOS.

Where it trumps both is in its deep social network integration. Hook up your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts within the Nokia Lumia 820’s Settings menu and all your social network updates will be weaved into the central People hub. This is like a traditional phone contacts book on steroids, letting you see what all your friends are up to, across all the most popular social networks.

The only issue is that flicking through a list of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn updates can see everything but tweets get a little lost – although it depends on your own social network behaviour, and you can view each network separately if you like anyway.

All the most popular email clients are supported without need for additional apps too, including Google Mail, Yahoo and – obviously – Microsoft-owned Outlook/Hotmail.

This info - emails, tweets, status updates - is relayed in roughly the same manner throughout the phone. The Windows Phone 8 visual style is pervasive, finding its way into many third-party apps as well as almost all pre-installed ones. Check out the screenshots to make sure you won’t hate it.

Not all the Nokia Lumia 820’s software best bits come from Microsoft, though. Perhaps the single best suite of apps comes from Nokia, in the form of Nokia Maps and Nokia Drive.

You could argue that Apple’s iOS 6 Maps were based on Nokia Maps, sharing a similar, smooth visual style. However, Nokia’s solution features none of the wonky information, mis-named roads and missing counties that made Apple Maps such a flop. Nokia Maps is pretty great.

And, best of all, Nokia Maps lets you download the maps of whole countries for use offline, making it just about the best free holiday navigation tool you can get. 

Nokia Drive is Maps’s in-car brother, desperate to make you ditch your TomTom. Although it doesn’t offer anything quite as advanced as HD Traffic, which uses the signals of mobile customers and TomTom users to track traffic in real-time, it’s just about good enough to stop those who don’t have a dedicated SatNav from buying one.

Microsoft’s key additional app is Microsoft Office, the mobile version of the desktop software that every office drone loves to hate. Windows Phone 8’s mobile take on Office is streamlined, rather than feature-packed. It lets you create Excel and Word files, or edit existing documents, including Powerpoint presentations. 

It’s emblematic of what Microsoft has gotten right with these newer mobile versions of Windows. Windows Mobile has actually been around since 2000, but before Windows Phone 7 it was an OS that tried to cram-in as much functionality as possible, sacrificing usability and accessibility in the process. The simple, easy-to-use Microsoft Office of the Nokia Lumia 820 is anything but that.

Nokia Lumia 820 – Apps and Games

Other apps will have to be downloaded from the Windows Store. Windows Phone 8 has more-or-less inherited the apps and games library of Windows Phone 7. It’s better than starting with nothing, but there are still plenty of holes that app fans will quickly notice. The library is poor compared to what's on offer from iOS and Android.

Windows Phone 8 is caught in something of a vicious circle here. The platform needs a larger audience to make developers consider creating Windows Phone ports a higher priority, but app support is one of the most serious turn-offs about “going Windows”. In short, patience will be required.

Windows games are siphoned-off into their own semi-separate store, then then filtered into Xbox-certified titles and the no-man’s land of the non-certified gaming wastes. That said, there are a few gems in the non-Xbox section.

 

Stick to the Xbox section and you’re guaranteed decent production values and not-entirely-shoddy gameplay. There are around 130 of these at present, and they take the pain out of app store searching for the less hardcore gamer.

Nokia Lumia 820 - Music, Video, Battery Life and Camera

Nokia Lumia 820 – Music and Video

Microsoft and Nokia share multimedia duties in the Nokia Lumia 820. The phone offers the standard Windows Phone 8 music services, comprised of a slick media player for your own tunes, a store front where you can buy digital music for around £8 an album, and the Xbox Music streaming service. This is a bit like Spotify, letting you stream a catalogue of millions of tracks for £9 a month, or £90 for a year.

Nokia Music, a separate app, adds in Nokia’s own music store, which again sells albums for around the £8 mark, and a wide array of Nokia Mixes. These are free-to-stream playlists – you pick the genre, decade or style and Nokia Music chooses the tracks. Streaming quality is fairly low and it’s no replacement for a full music streaming service, but it’s a welcome addition when not every music app is available for Windows Phone 8 yet.

We imagine most music fans will want to load their own tunes onto the Nokia Lumia 820, though. Windows Phone 8 makes this easy, letting you plug in the phone to a computer and transfer files without needing specific software. Alternatively, you can plug in a microSD card full of tunes or videos – the Lumia 820 supports cards up to 64GB.

Format support for both music and video is a bit limited, though. Lossless FLAC files aren’t supported, and neither is popular video format MKV. There are a few third-party media players out there that can fill these gaps, but there are far fewer than on Android or iOS – and it’s a shame to ditch the smooth native media player.

Nokia Lumia 820 – Camera

The Nokia Lumia 820 has two cameras, an 8-megapixel rear sensor and a surprisingly basic VGA user-facing camera. Most Android phones at the price offer at least 1-megapixel sensors – although for just a low-spec camera, this video chat-geared sensor is surprisingly good. 

The handset's main 8-megapixel sensor is a disappointment after the unusual, and unusually good Lumia 920, though. The Nokia Lumia 820 is capable of capturing sharp, fairly colourful images, but we found that both its white balance and focusing were a little unreliable at times.

The latter may be in part down to the lack of optical image stabilisation, which does feature in the Lumia 920, matched with the Nokia Lumia 820 trying to shoot a little faster than it necessarily should do. The missing stabilisation is even more noticeable when shooting video, although the Nokia Lumia 820’s camcorder mode does extend all the way up to 1080p. The dual-LED flash is more powerful than most too.

Its camera app at first appears simplistic, with basic image controls and no fun effects like Panorama or HDR in its settings menu. The truth is the opposite, though.

The Nokia Lumia 820 uses modular plug-ins called Lenses. These provide extra modes such as Panorama, and far more bizarre oddities besides. For example, the pre-installed Bing Vision is a QR code and barcode scanner. It’s not just about photographic delights. Additional Lenses are available to download within the app.

Nokia Lumia 820 – Call Quality and Battery Life

Although recent years have seen Nokia’s phone cred plummet from former great heights, it has continued to provide solidly-built phones with decent call quality. The Nokia Lumia 820 offers a good, loud earpiece speaker with full-bodied sound. There are dual microphones too, to let the phone remove ambient noise from the signal.

Battery life is not quite as robust, though. The Nokia Lumia 820 uses a 1650mAh battery, which is respectable but not stellar when many larger Android phones circle around the 2000mAh mark. It’ll last for a day and change between charges, but anyone who lives their life through their smartphone will still need to charge once a day. 

Nokia Lumia 820 – Value

On pre-pay, the Nokia Lumia 820 will cost you £330-350, or you can get the handset for free on a contract of around £25 and up for the 3G edition, or £35 for the 4G version. This is not a cheap phone, although it does offer a top-end experience.

The problem is that so do the lower-cost Windows Phone 8 devices, such as the Nokia Lumia 620 and HTC 8S. Top-end phones of 2013 tend to differentiate themselves with stellar cameras and screens – the Lumia 820 has a decent camera, but a fairly poor screen by today’s standards. We’d advise to wait for the inevitable price drop before opting for this phone.

Verdict

The Nokia Lumia 820 is a solid phone, but doesn’t have any of the stand-out features of the fantastic value Nokia Lumia 620, or the Nokia Lumia 920, with its excellent camera. Its screen is also a disappointment, suffering from the oversaturated colours OLED screens are prone to, while falling way behind the back in resolution terms. Performance is excellent, but it’s not the complete package we now expect at this upper-mid-range price.