Nokia Asha 501 launches in Thailand and Pakistan, will roll-out internationally in the coming weeks

Nokia has announced that the Asha 501, its first smartphone to run on the new and radically overhauled Asha mobile platform, is launching in Thailand and Pakistan this week.

It’s been a few weeks since Nokia unveiled the new low-end handset – which runs on the Series 40 mobile operating system – but the company also confirmed it would be rolling out “in subsequent weeks” to India, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Asia-Pacific and Latin America.

The device is part of a new range from Nokia aimed at emerging markets and those looking to buy their first smartphone. For a long time Asha handsets have been perceived as feature phones, but with the Asha 501 it’s clear that Nokia has pushed Series 40 into a new bracket of functionality.

It features two main screens, which Nokia calls ‘Home’ and ‘Fastlane’, for launching software and taking action on new notifications. Home is a more traditional take, with a grid of familiar icons for launching apps such as Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, as well as accessing common device settings.

The Fastlane view is a condensed notification center that unifies messages and activities from a number of Asha-supported apps and services. Updates are filtered based on time, so that the most recent and arguably pressing notifications are displayed at the top.

The Asha 501 has a recommended retail price of $99 (€75) and is designed to go toe-to-toe with the growing number of low-end Android smartphones, as well as Firefox OS and BlackBerry 10. The Asha platform is a huge improvement on its formative version, but it’s still a long way from matching the functionality found on Google’s popular mobile operating system.

Nevertheless, it’s an eye-catching device. The Asha 501 sports the usual rainbow range of color variants, including green, yellow, red and blue, wrapped in a body that looks both premium and incredibly durable. It features a fairly low resolution 3-inch touchscreen, however, and a 3.2-megapixel QVGA rear-facing camera.

There’s no front-facing camera to speak of, although Nokia has built its own voice-guided camera software to help users shoot the perfect self-portrait. It also weighs just 98 grams and comes with the Nokia Xpress Browser pre-loaded, which is capable of compressing Internet data by up to 90 percent.

The device isn’t coming to the US or Canada, where Nokia is prioritizing its Lumia range of Windows Phone 8 devices. Nevertheless, we’ll be keeping our ears to the ground and will let you know when the Asha 501 hits new international markets.

Posted by Unknown

on Wednesday, June 26, 2013

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evleaks: Nokia EOS to be officially named Lumia 1020

The long-rumored 41-megapixel Nokia EOS smartphone is expected to launch on July 11 at a press event held in New York, but we’ve always assumed EOS was just a code-name or placeholder for the handset, which will likely be a member of the Lumia family. Now, profilic mobile news leaker @evleaks is reporting that the device will actually be called the Nokia Lumia 1020, breaking the news on Twitter.

EOS = Nokia Lumia 1020

— @evleaks (@evleaks) June 25, 2013

The EOS, now presumably called the Nokia Lumia 1020, is expected to feature a massive 41-megapixel camera, which the company teased in an invitation to next month’s event, simply stating, “41 Million Reasons.” Based on leaked EOS photos, the device will sport a noticeable hump in the back where the massive camera protrudes, though that seems fair tradeoff for high quality photos.

The Finnish smartphone maker’s upcoming flagship handset is expected to land on AT&T next month, running Windows Phone 8 and could feature a 4.5-inch OLED display with a 1280 x 768-pixel resolution.

TechnoBuffalo will report live on July 11 starting at 11:00 a.m. EST from Nokia’s event, which the smartphone maker also promises will be available live online.

SOURCE: @EVLEAKS

Posted by Unknown

on Wednesday, June 26, 2013

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What does Nokia have planned for September 19th besides “Being awesome”?

Nokia’s Facebook page shared a calendar event, set to possibly take place in Stockholm on September the 19th at 12:00 noon.  Nokia asks, “what do you have planned for this Sunday?” Then goes on to tease, “Schedule some time for being awesome.” Being awesome.

Well, we know what is going to be happening on July 11th in New York City, the Nokia EOS will be announced featuring the super-anticipated 41MP camera, expected to be a worthy successor to the PureView 808.  As for September though, the rumor mill is pointing that a phablet (or phablets) will bear all for everyone to see. We may also see next generation Windows Phone hardware as part of the deal too, full 1080p screens and quad-core processors (even though Windows Phone runs quite nicely with the current silicon).

We are certain to learn more about what Nokia has up its sleeve in the near future, as for “being awesome,” we suspect that July 11th will prove to be pretty awesome in its own right when Nokia reinvents the zoom. Being awesome in September is going to be bonus.

Source: Nokia (Facebook) via Phonearena

Posted by Unknown

on Monday, June 24, 2013

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Nokia Lumia 920 taken for a spin on a roller coster, records the frantic action

We've been sent a link to a video captured by Windows Phone Central reader Daniel Smith, which shows an exciting ride on a roller coaster - the Cheetah at Busch Gardens theme park, Virginia. As one can see from the above footage, the Lumia 920 did a superb job at capturing the excitement as the carts travelled along the winding track.


Source:  wpcentral

Posted by Unknown

on Sunday, June 23, 2013

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Nokia Lumia 620 review

Introduction

Since the Windows Phone revolution started in 2010 with Windows Phone 7, things haven’t quite panned out as Microsoft hoped. Poor sales, slightly borked budget models and lack of public recognition didn’t help matters. But things are starting to turn around.

The Nokia Lumia 620 is a sign of this turnabout. A superb range of features, delightful design and excellent price make this not only the best budget Windows phone around, but one of the best budget phones, full stop.

Nokia Lumia 620 – Design and Features

The Nokia Lumia range is no stranger to commercial failure, but it has provided us with some of the most recognisable phones of the last few years, like the classic Lumia 800. Previous budget models had none of this flair, but the Nokia Lumia 620 is treated to a spoonful.

There isn't any of the high-end colour-drenched polycarbonate of the top Lumias, but the Nokia Lumia 620 is one of the cheeriest, most carefully-style affordable phones around. Its full-back removable plastic battery cover snakes around to the glass front of the screen, a perfect impression of a unibody phone that leaves the handset with no ugly seams, and palm-hugging smooth curves.

The Nokia Lumia 620 comes in seven colours, and each cover is a cut above the norm. Rather than being made of simple glossy plastic, each has two layers. The bottom is a thin layer of opaque plastic, topped with a secondary translucent layer that gives depth to the finish. It may not feel like a top-end phone exactly, but this makes the Lumia 620 seem classier and more interesting than many other budget blowers, including its comparatively dull predecessor, the Lumia 610. 

With a bit of imagination, you could even say that the red case gives the Lumia 620 the impression of being ringed with neon, viewed from the front.

Fun energy and accessibility are what the Nokia Lumia 620 is after, and it gets both in spades. A few years ago, the 3.8-inch screen of this phone would have seemed huge, but now that the high street phone shop is dominated with mammoth mobiles like the Samsung Galaxy S3, the Lumia 620 seems positively kid-friendly. At 11mm thick, it’s certainly not slim, but the ergonomic purity of the phone’s unbroken curves mean you barely notice the chunk factor. 

The Nokia Lumia 620’s relatively small size makes reaching the phone’s on-body buttons a cinch, helped by Nokia’s characteristic button placement. Where most phone-makers tend to put power buttons up top and volume rockers on a side edge, the Nokia Lumia 620 lays all its buttons along the right edge. The power button naturally rests under your thumb if you’re right-handed, and the volume controls are only a thumb slide away. 

Further down this right edge you’ll find the camera shutter button. It’s rare in phones these days, but is a requirement of every Windows Phone 8 mobile. As this button automatically launches the camera app, we were concerned holding the phone might accidentally set the thing off, but in-use we encountered no such problems. 

This shutter button is a symptom of the ways in which Windows Phone is restrictive, but the Nokia Lumia 620 also demonstrates some of the ways Windows Phone 8 has loosened up a few of these. Most important of all, take off the battery cover and you’ll find a microSD memory card slot. 

The Nokia Lumia 620 comes with 8GB of internal memory, just under 5GB of which is accessible. This is plenty for a handful of apps and games, but if you want to make this your music player as well as your mobile, you’ll need more storage. Phones of the previous generation - Windows Phone 7 mobiles - didn’t support this handy expandable memory feature.
 
Another recent improvement is the ease of file transfers. In the previous Nokia Lumia phones, you had to hook up to the Zune desktop software to transfer files - much like the iPhone's relationship with iTunes. There are no such annoying restrictions here. You can just plug the Nokia Lumia 620 into a computer to drag ‘n’ drop, bung in a microSD card or even share files over Bluetooth. Owning a Windows Phone mobile comes with far fewer irritations than it used to. 

Nokia Lumia 620 – Wireless Connectivity

Wireless connectivity is a different story. It’s excellent for a low-cost phone.There are few sockets on the Nokia Lumia 620 – just a microUSB port on the bottom edge and a 3.5mm headphone jack up top. And, oddly, the headphone input is built into the case rather than the phone itself, connecting with little metal contacts, but functionally it makes no difference. 

Staples like Bluetooth, HSPA 3G mobile internet and GPS are all expected in a modern smartphone, but including NFC in the Lumia 620 wins Nokia a fistful of tech brownie points. Although the  NFC is in its infancy in terms of mainstream adoption, it’s an important element of the future-proofing of this phone.

NFC stands for Near-Field Communication and lets devices communicate wirelessly over short distances. The most attention-grabbing use of NFC is in making payments on the high street without a credit card, but it can also be used to transmit information between devices. Windows Marketplace even offers a section in its app store showing off NFC-based apps. 

All the Nokia Lumia 620 misses out on is 4G. And such a connection won’t be much use in a budget phone for at least a year. Would you really fork out for a contract that gets you a £400 phone and opt for a £150 one?


Nokia Lumia 620 – Screen

It may not miss out on many wireless doodads, but the cost-cutting measures of the Nokia Lumia 620 are clear in its screen specs. There’s no problem with the screen’s relatively diminutive 3.8-inch size, but its resolution of 800 x 480 does seem very basic in 2013. To put this into some context, top-end phones of this year like the Samsung Galaxy S4 will offer more than five times the number of pixels. 

Technologically the Nokia Lumia 620 screen may appear dated, but in person its image quality is great. This is down to combination of factors, with Nokia’s ClearBlack “technology” at the forefront. In more expensive Lumia phones, ClearBlack essentially means using a high-quality OLED screen. Here, though, a more traditional LCD panel is used. The ClearBlack instead seems to refer to the use of a reflection-reducing polarisation filter and, quite simply, a high-quality screen panel.

Colours are vivid but natural-looking, contrast is excellent for such an affordable phone and top brightness is searingly-bright when required.

Windows Phone 8 doesn’t give you as much control over the backlight’s brightness as, say, an iPhone or Android mobile. There’s an ambient light sensor (again, occasionally missing from low-cost phones) that can set brightness automatically, or you can set it to “low”, “medium” or “high”. It’s far less flexible than a good old brightness slider. 

The pixel paucity is also mitigated by the visual optimisation of Windows Phone 8. Text rendering throughout the system’s interface is carefully managed, ensuring that there’s never a jaggedy edge to be seen. Where you will start to notice the lower resolution is in the web browser, and third-party apps and games.

Nokia Lumia 620 – Windows Phone 8 and Performance

The Windows Phone 8 software that’s at the heart of the Nokia Lumia 620 feels positively luxurious in a budget phone like this. Android has come a long way in its last few iterations, but cheaper Android phones are too often spoiled, visually or performance-wise, by poorly-executed custom user interfaces.
  
As Windows Phone doesn’t allow manufacturers to fiddle with the core software in any dramatic way, there’s no such nonsense here. The Nokia Lumia 620 flies along, with barely any lag whatsoever - aside from unavoidable pauses during app loading. 

Its dual-core 1GHz Snapdragon S4 and 512MB of RAM are, like the phone’s screen resolution, far from cutting edge. But they’re more than enough to make Windows Phone 8 run beaitifully. Let’s not forget, the last generation’s flagship Lumia 800 used a far less powerful single-core processor.

Windows Phone 8 adds features and flexibility not seen in Windows Phone 7, but the basic structure of the system hasn’t changed. There’s a scrolling home screen that you populate with Live Tiles that either occupy a quarter the width of the screen, half of it or the whole thing. One of the new features of Windows Phone 8 is being able to use these smaller quarter-width icons. 

Flick right-to-left from this screen and you’re taken to the full apps menu, which arranges all your apps – bar games – into a simple list.

All this information is then weaved-into the Nokia Lumia 620’s People hub. In other phones, this might simply hold your contacts, but in Windows Phone 8 it’s where you go for all your social updates. However, you can also install separate Facebook and Twitter apps if the People hub is too crowded for your liking. 

Windows Phone 8’s Kid’s Corner is a newer addition. It lets you setup a kid-friendly area on your phone, where you can ban access to things like email clients and violent games. Sensibly, Microsoft has kept this feature hidden in the Settings menu, to stop it from cluttering up the phones of singletons.

All this information is then weaved-into the Nokia Lumia 620’s People hub. In other phones, this might simply hold your contacts, but in Windows Phone 8 it’s where you go for all your social updates. However, you can also install separate Facebook and Twitter apps if the People hub is too crowded for your liking. 


Nokia Lumia 620 – Nokia Maps and Drive

One of the best features of the Nokia Lumia 620 is a Nokia staple, though. Nokia Maps is a great mapping and GPS solution that offers a fantastic USP – being able to download maps for use offline, for free. You don’t have to be in the area of the map to download it, either. Just rifle through the Settings menu and you can pick whole zones to grab.



Nokia Lumia 620 – People and Kid’s Corner

Windows Phone 8 is a fairly fully-featured OS. It lets you share your mobile internet connection as a Wi-Fi hotspot, can be set to automatically backup your data to SkyDrive, Microsoft’s Cloud storage solution, and offers full integration of social networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn as well as all the most popular email providers. 

England weighs-in at 238MB, for example. This doesn’t include satellite views, which are available from within the app on the fly, but for those looking for a map that won’t cost them roaming data to access, Nokia Maps is about the best you can get without paying. It works well as an in-car GPS too, using Nokia Drive. Again, this can use pre-downloaded maps to save you a fortune in roaming fees while tearing down a German autobahn.

A slightly more frivolous use of location data is seen in Nokia City Lens. This is an augmented reality app that uses the Nokia Lumia 620’s camera to give you a view of the world overlaid with local restaurants, hotels, transport links and attractions. Never will you look more touristy and mug-able than looking at the world through a phone, but it’s a fun diversion nevertheless.

 

Nokia Lumia 620 – Microsoft Office

If Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8 has a key app-based USP, it has to be Office integration. In the dedicated Office app, you can create Excel spreadsheets and Word documents, as well as edit Powerpoint presentations. Naturally, it’s all linked up to Microsoft’s SkyDrive Cloud storage solution. Embrace SkyDrive and you’ll have a pretty nifty way to read and edit your work documents on-the-go.

Like almost all Windows Phone 8 apps, Microsoft Office is laid out in the house style too, never cramming too much information into a page. It’s not as flexible or powerful as a “full” version of Office, but it’s highly usable, and that’s the main thing. 


Nokia Lumia 620 – Apps and Games
For all your other app needs, you’ll have to take a trip down to the Windows Store. This is the umbrella under which you’ll find Windows Phone 8’s apps, games and music portals.

 It’s also where we stumble upon what is probably the Nokia Lumia 620’s greatest problem. Although Windows Phone 8 has gained most of the apps found in the previous Windows Phone 7 platform, the selection is far more limited than what you’ll find in an Android phone or iPhone. Microsoft claims there’s an impressive-sounding 120,000 apps aboard, but app fans will soon find holes in its app selection.

On the positive side, pricing of Windows apps seems to be improving, with the bottom-rung price of 79p now inhabited by many games that used to cost well over a pound previously.

The relatively limited selection is a particular shame for games, as the Nokia Lumia 620 offers solid integration with Xbox Live, the online service for Xbox 360. You can earn Xbox Live achievement points through games that have been Xbox-certified. These games live in a separate “Xbox” area within the Windows games store, and generally offer the best gaming experiences available on Windows Phone. 

At the time of writing there were 135 of these titles. It's enough to keep you busy for a while, but it's a very small selection. And we found that a couple were disappointingly crash-happy, given the amount of certification that's meant to have taken place.

Nokia Lumia 620 – Camera

The Nokia Lumia 620 has two cameras. There’s a 5-megapixel sensor on the rear, supported by a single-LED flash, and a basic VGA user-facing camera for video calling. 

Neither is going to trouble any high-end smartphone on image quality, but a lack of serious shutter lag and acceptable focusing speed mean the Nokia Lumia 620’s camera usability is far better than many Android phones at the price. Low-cost smartphones often suffer from shutter lag so severe than their cameras are painful to use. 

The Nokia Lumia 620 camera app does not offer a bundle of fun filters and effects off the bat, but Windows Phone 8 does let you use camera modules called Lenses. Smart Shoot and Bing Vision come pre-installed. 

Smart Shoot takes a series of photos in reasonably quick succession, letting you pick the one where your subject looks the best (shooting speed is a little slow for this to be truly effective) and Bing Vision is a QR and Barcode scanner. 

Useful additional lenses you can download include Nokia exclusives like Panorama and the fun “picture animator” Cinematograph, which captures video and stills simultaneously to let you produce a vid where the majority of the scene stays completely still. Ok, maybe that one is not all that useful, but it is a laugh. 

There are bundles off third-party lenses you can grab too, from useless fluff (the majority) to interesting extras. 

Image quality is acceptable at the price, with solid focusing and decent detail for a lower-cost 5-megapixel model, but otherwise unremarkable. Colours are a tad under-saturated and in lower-light conditions, noise and chromatic aberration is prolific. Usability is the key here, though, and the Lumia 620 makes photo-taking quick and enjoyable – the main thing for today’s social networking snappers.

Nokia Lumia 620 – Calling Quality and Battery Life

A feature that could potentially go unappreciated by some is the noise cancellation that the Lumia 620 employs while you’re taking a call. Using the signal from the two microphones on the phone – one on the bottom edge and one up top – it attempts to remove ambient noise from the phone signal before it reaches whoever you’re calling.Call quality on your end is unremarkable, though. It’s quite boxy-sounding, lacking both top-end clarity and the robust body of a bassier speaker. 

Battery life too is another slightly sore point. The Nokia Lumia 620 uses a 1300mAh battery, and in our experience it needed a charge before the day was out with moderate-to-heavy use. If you’re going to be doing much at all in the way of using apps or playing games, you’ll have to charge every day without a doubt. 

Nokia Lumia 620 – Value

So-so call quality, mediocre battery life and app support that lags a way behind Android rivals aren’t enough to turn us off the Nokia Lumia 620. At £150, it is simply such good value, crammed into such a well-designed body, that you can’t help but love the little handset. 

It sheds virtually all the most serious compromises of its predecessor, the Nokia Lumia 610, to become perhaps the most important Windows Phone 8 device out there. And one of the best budget phones, regardless of platform. 

Verdict

The Nokia Lumia 620 is a revelation, showing that budget Windows Phone mobiles don’t have to be riddled with compromises and lack any semblance of personality. Top-notch hardware design, plenty of power and a feature list that betters many Android phones at the price should make this the gateway drug for many who have been unconvinced by Windows Phone to date. Only the existing shortcomings app library shortcomings of Windows Phone 8 hold this phone back.
 

Posted by Unknown

on Saturday, June 22, 2013

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New Nokia Lumia 925 commercial portrays iPhone users as zombies

Nokia has unveiled a zombie-filled advert for its brand new Lumia 925 smartphone. The ad shows iPhone-holding zombies gradually closing in on a Nokia user wandering the streets at night.

The joke is that the LED flash on the iPhone 5 causes pictures to white out and produce red eye, making you look like a zombie. Obviously Nokia is keen to show off the Lumia's low-light  imaging capabilities, which wouldn't require a zombie creating flash.

The joke is on the iPhone camera, as the zombiedom is passed through the use of its flash. The zombies are washed out, pale and red-eyed due to the use of the iPhone 5′s back facing LED flash, much like subjects in flash photos often end up.

The Lumia 925 has excellent l0w light capabilities, unlike pretty much any other smart phone camera currently available, its CCD can take clear night-time images without the need for flash.

So, surprisingly, the joke isn’t that iPhone users are zombie like followers (a common theme in Samsung ads), it’s about the camera! Apple generally tends to take the high road with this type of advertising, and doesn’t bite back. But maybe an Apple ad focusing on the plusses of the iPhone camera will be coming soon?

Check out the ad below!

Posted by Unknown

on Saturday, June 22, 2013

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Nokia Lumia 925 review

Nokia announced the Lumia 925 at its May 14, 2013 event in London, and the phone was brought to the stage as “the most advanced smartphone” on the market. The buzz-word of the day was aluminum; the company emphasized the advantages of using aluminum for the phone’s body, granting overall better reception and antenna performance. However, the Lumia 925 is not made completely out of aluminum. The back panel, non-removable, is still made out of polycarbonate: this time, a very soft-touch version of it.

Nokia also slightly tweaked the design of the Lumia 925. While one can still instantly recognize it as a Nokia phone, it is somewhat different from the Lumia 920 and Lumia 928. It is no longer the tank its predecessor was; instead, we’re looking at a thinner, more elegant, slicker version of the phone.In addition to some design tweaks, Nokia also improved its PureView camera (stage-two, OIS and low-light version) over the unit on the Lumia 920 by throwing in an additional sixth lens, for better overall sharpness, color reproduction, and image quality.

So what does the Nokia Lumia 925 have to offer and should you be rushing out to buy this latest Windows Phone 8 handset?

Nokia Lumia 925 - Design

Internally, the core of the Nokia Lumia 925 is fairly similar to the Lumia 920, but externally it’s a completely different proposition. Rather than a chunky, heavy and colourful curvy block of glossy plastic, it is a non-unibody monochrome device.

This is all down to the phone’s anodised aluminium edge. A strip of metal runs around the Lumia 925’s sides, and there’s no attempt to hide the seam between these sides and the contoured polycarbonate (plastic) plate on the rear.

The two parts are intended to complement each other, and that’s why Nokia has opted for white, black and grey rear parts, rather than colourful ones. After having been lauded for the curvy polycarbonate bodies of phones like the Lumia 800, this new style is a risk. But it works.
Build quality is excellent, with none of the clicking or flexing you might see in a phone like this from a less-capable mobile-maker.  The seam between the plastic rear and metal sides is a little wider on one edge – visibly so – but Nokia says this is to help professional repairers fix the phone in future, giving them much easier access to its innards.

In-hand comfort is great, thanks to the curves of the aluminium sides and that the Lumia 925 is a good deal less wide than top phones like the Samsung Galaxy S4 - mainly due to its mid-size 4.5-inch screen.

There are some hardware inflections that some won’t like, though. The camera lens housing is large, a bit too easy to obstruct with a hand, and it sticks out ever-so-slightly from the Lumia 925’s back. This is because of the mechanical image stabilisation components that have to fit in – the phone is just 8.5mm thick, so too skinny to avoid this. The Lumia 920’s camera doesn’t poke out, but that phone is 2mm thicker - a lot in mobile terms - and 40g heavier.

Where the Lumia 900 was conspicuously huge and heavy, the Nokia Lumia 925 appears ‘normal’ in the world of super-slim phones in which we live.

Part of the weight loss is down to the removal of integrated wireless charging. This time around, you need to buy a separate wireless charging exoskeleton, which hooks into the phone's battery through three little metal circles on the Lumia 925's rear.

These charging shells supply the traditional Lumia series splash of colour too, although muted black/white ones are available. The shells cost £25, and Qi wireless charging pads start at around £30. For a full wireless charging setup, you're looking at an extra £50-odd.

Hardware and performance

The Lumia 925 is a departure from Lumia series norms in some respects, but other design elements remain. On the top edge of the phone is a microSIM slot accessed using a paperclip-like tool included in the box – classic Lumia. There is also no memory card slot in the phone, just 16/32GB of internal memory (32GB exclusive to Vodafone), so the only sockets on show are the headphone jack and microUSB port – which sit next to each other up top.
All other edges are left blissfully free of ports. It’s good for the look and feel of the Lumia 925. There’s just the Lumia-standard trio of buttons on the right edge – volume, power and the Windows-mandated shutter button.
 As only the edges of the Nokia Lumia 925 are made of metal, it doesn’t have quite the hard, cool impact of holding an HTC One. But it is one of the more attractive, recognisable phones of the year.

There's a 2000mAh battery inside powering the whole thing and thanks to that sealed body, you won't be able to access it for a quick change. The standby times are pretty impressive, but like all top-tier smartphones, if you're a heavy user, you'll soon find yourself looking for a charge before the day is out. We managed to get most of the way through a working day, but found the battery levels were looking alarming mid-afternoon, as is often the case on devices of this size and power.

Those clip-on charging covers, so you can drop your device onto a wireless charging pillow, look attractive but, ironically, once you've added one you're back to a thicker device again.

All the connectivity you'd expect is here, including NFC, Wi-Fi, GPS and so on, along with LTE for those who have the network support for faster mobile data. Nokia has made pains to point out that this is its first metal-bodied phone, but also to state that reception hasn't been affected. We found that to ring true, with no problems connecting to wireless networks.

When it comes to calling, the quality it good, with plenty of volume and no reported problems from callers. We did encounter a SIM problem, however. At first we put this down to a faulty device and called in a second device as it wasn't recognising any SIM card. The second device accepted one SIM card, but complained about others - all of which work across other devices. It may be nothing, but it's worth keeping an eye on other reviews to see whether this is an isolated case or not.

Arriving with the same hardware as the Lumia 920 means that the performance and the experience of using the 925 is very similar. In fact, it's similar across Nokia's range of Windows Phone 8 handsets, however the Lumia 925 arrives with the latest software, which is yet to land on other devices, so it feels like there are now more options and more control, with the option to tweak the display colour profile, for example.

Display and Camera Performance

The display, while still at 4.5 inches in diagonal, is now a PureMotion HD+ ClearBlack AMOLED screen, with the same 768 x 1280 resolution. This results in a PPI rating of 334, more than fine enough for everyone’s eyesight, definitely enough for Windows Phone’s graphics.

The camera, while still an 8.7-megapixel, PureView (stage two) construction, is improved, at least on paper. Nokia added a sixth lens — in addition to the five lenses on the Lumia 920 and Lumia 928 — which should further improve picture quality in both low-light and bright, optimal, conditions. Optical image stabilization (OIS) is present as part of the PureView package, and the low-light sensitivity is as good as it always was. The camera specs also include the 1/3-inch sensor, f/2.0 aperture, 26mm focal length lens, and a minimum of 8cm focus range. The main shooter is accompanied by an f/2.4 1.2-megapixel wide-angle front-facer.

Software experience

The Nokia Lumia 925 is a Windows Phone 8 mobile. Although recent updates to Android have closed the gap between the two systems, Windows is still the snappiest mobile OS around. It is also the most aggressively stylised.

Like Android, it is split into two main sections, the apps menu and the home screen. Both scroll vertically in Windows Phone 8, ready to give your thumb a workout.

As Windows Phone 8 doesn’t allow manufacturers to brand the interface with their own look or style, the software of the Lumia 925 looks much the same as it does on any other up-to-date Windows phone. And, despite several enriching updates, Windows Phone 8 is a system that tends to attract and repel with some severity.

It’s taut, it’s rigid, it’s fast – but it is also restrictive and, in some ways, malnourished.

What used to define Nokia phones among their Windows peers was their inclusion of Nokia Maps apps. But the company’s deepening partnership with Microsoft has seen this app suite rebranded as HERE Maps, letting it spread to other Windows phones.

It’s no longer a Nokia USP.

However, they remain great apps if – like the rest of Windows Phone 8 – arguably a bit too keenly stylised.

HERE Maps is your equivalent to Google Maps, letting you navigate while on foot. HERE Drive is an in-car GPS navigator and HERE City Lens is an augmented reality app that lets you find nearby attractions, such as restaurants.

Their main bonus over their rivals is that HERE lets you pre-install maps to the phone’s memory so you don’t have to stream them on the fly. Whole countries and continents are there for the taking if you have the storage. And the UK plus a few chunks of Europe should only take around 10 per cent of the phone’s 16GB .

If these apps are no longer specific to Nokia, what does the Lumia 925 have to shout about, apps-wise? Its key software benefits are largely restricted to minor tweaks and the camera app Nokia Smart Cam, which we’ll cover later.

One small software extra the Lumia 925 provides is called Glance Screen. This is a mode that displays a clock when the phone is in standby. This may prove distracting at bed time, but you can also switch it off or change the standard white font to red to reduce the light pumped-out by the screen.

This Glance Screen feature is viable battery-wise because of the way AMOLED screen work, consuming much less battery when only part of the screen is non-black. It will cause a minor battery life hit, though. 

In all, the Nokia Lumia 925 is a capable, high-end smartphone and we enjoyed our time with it. It crams all the core componentry from the Lumia 920 into a slimmer, lighter chassis, and has a slightly improved camera along with some fun extra features. It sports the full package of Nokia extras, including Here Maps and Drive, Nokia Music and Transport.

Specifications:

Software: Windows Phone 8

Processor: Dual-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm SnapdragonS4

Memory slot: Yes

Display: 4.5in PureMotion HD+ AMOLED touchscreen,1280x768 pixels

Connectivity: Wi-Fi a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0

Ports: microUSB, 3.5mm headphone jack

Camera: 8.7 megapixel PureView with Carl ZeissTessar lens, auto focus, 4x digital zoom, dual LED flash; 1.2megapixel front-facing camera with F2.4 lens

Video playback: MP4, WMV, AVI, 3GP, 3G2, M4V,MOV

Audio playback: MP3, AMR-NB, WMA 10 Pro, GSM FR,WMA 9, AAC LC, AAC+/HEAAC, eAAC+/HEAACv2

Radio: Yes

Battery: 2,000mAh

Size: 129x71x9mm

Weight: 139g

Posted by Unknown

on Thursday, June 20, 2013

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Nokia Expected to Show Off 41-Megapixel Camera Next Month

Nokia has dropped a strong hint that it is close to showing off the long-rumoured radical camera phone after it sent out invites to a press conference.

When the company first showed off its Pureview sensor last year, the software underpinning it was still based on the Symbian OS, but the capabilities of the camera sensor stunned commentators.

Nokia has been widely rumoured in recent weeks to be planning a Windows Phone based Lumia handset incorporating the 41MP camera sensor this summer.

Although the camera is capable of taking massive photos, its primary aim is to enable very high level zooming in without losing resolution - something which has not been possible on a cameraphone to date - and also for the cameraphone to work in very low light levels without needing a flash.

That functionality would fit in very neatly with the press invite, which is to a "zoon" event.

Nokia has also recently invested in a company that has developed a groundbreaking camera design -- based around a 16 lens array. Pelican Imaging's computational camera technology provides depth mapping at every pixel, enabling "the perfect picture" every time and allowing users to perform an unprecedented range of selective focus and edits, both pre- and post-capture. The camera itself is also about 50% thinner than existing mobile cameras.

The Nokia press event will take place on 11th July.

Posted by Unknown

on Tuesday, June 18, 2013

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New Nokia EOS leaked online

The Nokia EOS has to be one of the most leaked handsets of all time. And now it’s back – this time showing off its metal-clad bodywork.

The EOS is expected to launch in New York on July 11. Widely believed to be the first Windows Phone handset to feature Nokia’s 41-megapixel PureView camera tech, expectation ahead of the EOS’s unveiling is understandably high.

From these images, it appears that the right panel of the Nokia EOS houses the volume rocker, the screen lock/ power off key along with the dedicated camera button. The back panel of this forthcoming smartphone is also on display in these alleged shots.

Invites for the New York event are now in circulation where Nokia promises Zoom – as we know it on smartphones – will be reinvented. Nokia’s 808 41-megapixel camera used oversampling techniques during capture and one of the effects of this was that it offered a ‘lossless zoom’ – the EOS is expected to feature something similar.

Not much else is known about the EOS’s hardware and specs although reports suggest it’s likely to be largely similar to what we’ve already seen on the Lumia 925, meaning a dual-core Snapdragon CPU, 720p display with ClearBlack and PureMotion HD+ technology and 2GB of RAM.

Microsoft’s Windows Phone GDR3 update – the one that adds in support for quad-core processors and 1080p displays – isn’t expected to debut until later on in the year, so it’s unlikely the EOS will carry comparable specs top flight Android handsets like the HTC One and Galaxy S4.

That said no other handset will have imaging capabilities anyway near the EOS, so that’s quite a USP for the handset in and of itself. No one does imaging better than Nokia although Samsung is about to have a go with the launch of its Galaxy S4 Zoom, which has a 16-megapixel camera with 10x optical zoom.

In addition to this, earlier rumours have indicated that Nokia EOS will pack in OLED display, which has a screen resolution of 768X1280 pixels and 32GB of internal storage.

There have also been news reports suggesting that Nokia EOS will feature a new "Nokia Pro Camera" app that has a refreshed interface. This app will be in addition to the regular camera app. The refreshed camera interface will also offer manual focus option. 

Posted by Unknown

on Monday, June 17, 2013

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Nokia Lumia 720 review

The Lumia 720 is bang in the middle of Nokia's line of Windows Phone 8 offerings. It aims to offer some of the premium features found in the Lumia 920 and Lumia 820 at a price that's pocket-friendly like that of Lumia 520 and Lumia 620 .

Does the Nokia Lumia 720 deliver on its promise or does it end up being a confused offering? Let's find out.

Build/ Design 

It's easy to fall in love with the Lumia 720. Industrial design has always been Nokia's strength, and with the 720, the company seems to have outdone itself. The 720 takes Lumia 920's solid build and packs it in a smaller package that fits perfectly in the hand. 

The Lumia 920 was ridiculed for being too heavy - and rightly so - and even though the 720 is no 920 replacement, we can't help but feel that, at least as far as design is concerned, this is the phone that Nokia's previous flagship should've been. We much prefer the matte finish on our Red Lumia 720 to the glossy Yellow 920 we got. Fingerprints are no issue with the 720, with the body as well as the screen remaining practically smudge free. The button placement on the Lumia 720 is similar to other recent members of the family. The right edge has the volume rocker, the power/ lock button and the dedicated camera button towards the bottom. The top edge has the microSIM and headphone jack, while the left and bottom edges feature the microSD slot and Micro-USB ports, respectively.

The front features much thinner bezels on the side, again, compared to the 920, which had a display that looked bigger than it really was, due to the wasted space on all four sides. While the Lumia 720 display isn't exactly edge-to-edge, it makes much better utilisation of the space.

Below the screen are the three standard Windows Phone buttons: Back (which doubles up as an app switcher on long press), Windows/ Home (long press for Speech) and the Search button, that continues to be as useless as ever even for Bing users like us, as it just brings up a Bing search box. We really wish Microsoft offered a unified search instead, or let us configure this button to launch something else entirely. Just above the display we have the Nokia branding and ear piece grill, with the front-facing camera just to the left.The back of our Red Lumia 720 has the rear-camera lens in the centre right next to the LED flash and Carl Zeiss branding. A NOKIA logo sits back in the middle, with the bottom part having three wireless charging pins and barely legible certification info as well as the text Made in China embossed. A speaker grill sits on the bottom left corner.

All in all, we'd go so far as to say that the Lumia 720 is our favourite Nokia phone till date, at least as far as industrial design is concerned.

Display 

Nokia Lumia 720 comes with a 4.3-inch display of 480x800 pixels resolution, translating to a density of 217 pixels per inch. While that doesn't sound impressive, the real life experience is quite good.

Colour reproduction on the ClearBlack LCD is quite accurate. The viewing angles and outdoors visibility are as good as you'll come across. Like the Lumia 920, you can operate 720's touchscreen while wearing gloves.

Overall, while we sure wish the 720 sported a higher resolution display, there's no doubting the quality of this one.

Camera 

The Lumia 720 comes with a 6.7-megapixel rear camera with Carl Zeiss optics that is a solid performer overall. The camera takes good photos outdoors when there's plenty of light. The colours look natural and don't appear saturated or artificial in any way. However, pictures clicked under bright artificial lights appear a little washed out. 

In low light conditions, the Lumia 720 shines bright (pardon the pun). The LED flash works surprisingly well, and illuminates the subjects within its range uniformly. Even when you choose to disable the flash, the 720 delivers good results - not quite the 920 low-light image quality, but then this is a phone that costs half as much, which makes it especially great.

The camera software lets you tweak a few settings for still pictures like Scenes (Auto, Close-Up, Night, Portrait, Night Portrait, Sports, Backlight), ISO, Exposure Value, White Balance, Aspect Ratio, and Focus Assist Light.

The bundled Smart Lenses like Smart Shoot, Cinemagraph, Nokia Glam Me, Panorama and Bing Vision. We had mixed results with these. Cinemagraph (create GIFs from images) and Nokia Glam Me (add effects to images) are gimmicky at best, they work as advertised. However, when you come to Smart Shoot and Panorama, things get a bit rough.

Smart Shoot is Nokia's much advertised feature that detects faces - and other objects - and lets you do things like removing unwanted things from a photo and/ or mix and match 'faces' from a series of photos taken in the same setting. While this makes for a great demo, real life results leave a lot to be desired, as the phone failed to detect many faces in a group photograph.

Similarly, Panorama is a horrible implementation of what has become a standard feature in most phones. Instead of holding up your phone and just moving it around to take a Panorama, NOKIA chose to go a peculiar way. Click a photograph and watch it appear on the left most corner of your screen and stay there. You are then expected to align this picture with the real world view that you see on your screen, and when the two are perfectly aligned, click another one. And so on, so that the phone can 'stitch' these photos together. This definitely feels like an implementation from a bygone era that people are unlikely to put up with to click Panoramas from their Nokia Lumia 720.

Of course, the 720 is not the only phone that suffers from these drawbacks, as the other Windows Phone 8 members of the Lumia family use the same lenses. 

In case you are wondering, Bing Vision can be used to scan QR codes and Microsoft tags.

The Lumia 720 is capable of recording only 720p video, which may disappoint the spec crazy, but is unlikely to be missed by most. There's no fancy stuff like image stabilisation - as found in the Lumia 920 - still, the smartphone is capable of taking decent videos. The built-in mic does a capable job of picking up the sounds, and the audio quality is good as well.

The 1.3-megapixel front camera can record 720p videos. Like most front cameras, it does a good job for video chats, and still photography in well-lit conditions, but leaves a lot to be desired in dim lights.

Software/ User Interface 

Nokia Lumia 720 runs on Windows Phone 8, which means there isn't much room for customisation, other than preloading certain apps. Similar to its other Windows Phone 8-running Lumia cousins, the 720 comes with a host of pre-installed apps like BIGFLIX (entertainment), BookMyShow (booking tickets), Cosmopolitan (lifestyle magazine), HERE Drive, HERE Maps, Hike (messaging), Nokia Music, TripAdvisor (travel), and Zomato (food/ restaurants guide). 

Standard apps like Internet Explorer, Office, One Note, Wallet, and the experience is no different than any other Windows Phone 8 device. As mentioned in the Camera section, the phone comes with some lenses, which also show up as stand-alone apps. These are Bing Vision, Cinemgraph, Nokia Glam Me, Panorama and Smart Shoot.PhotoBeamer is another interesting app that lets you beam your photos to any computer over Wi-Fi, providing an instant, wireless slideshow you can see over a large screen. During our tests, this worked as advertised.

Xbox games is your gaming hub, where most games get installed by default. You can maintain your profile and do other related activities.

We are big fans of the Transfer My Data app, which imported contacts and messages from our old Nokia phone over Bluetooth with minimum fuss. Another one of our personal favourites, the Drive app performs great as ever, and it remains our preferred navigation app on any platform, even above Google Maps. Nokia Music - with free, downloadable, DRM-free music for a year, is always well received as well.

Performance/ Battery Life 

The Nokia Lumia 720 handles pretty much everything you throw at it without any hiccups. Yes, there's no quad-core processor, but you are unlikely to miss that in every day activities. From browsing, to playing music, to emails or editing Office files, everything goes off smoothly.

One area where we were keen to put Lumia 720 under the test was gaming. We installed quite a few games on our 720, including popular titles such Angry Birds, AE Bowling 3D, Ice Age Village, AE 3D Motor, 3D Brutal Chase, and AE Fruit Slash. We were able to play all these games without any hiccups.

One disappointing aspect of the Lumia 720 is the 512MB RAM, which means we couldn't even install games like Temple Run that need 1GB RAM. While we are disappointed with Nokia's decision to ship with half the RAM of what many cheaper Android phones are shipping with, we hope developers of games such as Temple Run can optimise their apps not to be so resource hungry. Perhaps that is an issue for Microsoft to address as well, as devices with much lesser RAM are able to run these games fine on other platforms.

Call quality on the Lumia 720 is rock solid, like most other Nokia phones. We are no fans of having loudspeaker on the back of the phone, since the sound gets muffled when the phone is lying face up, and, sadly, the 720 suffers on that front. The loudspeaker output is otherwise quite good. The phone takes a Micro-SIM and comes with expandable storage via a microSD card.

The Nokia Lumia 720 is unlikely to need a bail out in the middle of the day as far as battery life is concerned. On a full charge, we were able to get more than 26 hours before reaching for the charger, with the phone on 3G all the time and the screen set to full brightness. We also had three email accounts, two Twitter accounts and one Facebook account configured with notifications enabled, along with some amount of browsing, checking & sending emails, Twitter & Facebook usage, clicking pictures, and listening to our favourite songs on Nokia Music - or as we call it, just another day.

Verdict 

At Rs. 18,999, the Nokia Lumia 720 is a really attractive proposition. The phone checks all the right boxes, from great looks, to a camera that performs quite well, and hardware that handles pretty much everything you throw its way. Yes, Windows Phone still has a long way to go before it can begin to compete with Android and iOS, but unless you are someone who must have access to the latest apps, it will do the job for you, since most popular titles, barring a few high-profile exceptions (like Instagram) are already here. 

In terms of pricing, the Lumia 720 is sandwiched between the Micromax A116 Canvas HD  and Samsung Galaxy Grand Duos, but we recommend the Nokia, since it delivers a great design and a better camera, while maintaing a real-world performance that is at least comparable to its Android-based rivals.

Source: NDTV

Posted by Unknown

on Tuesday, June 11, 2013

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