Our urge to always try something new never ends. Nokia’s Lumia series especially the Lumia 920 isn’t just about a Windows Phone experience. It is far beyond that. While you get all the new features in Windows Phone 8 like the resizable tiles, kids corner and many other little new features, you also get the best of Nokia which obviously includes a phone with tough build quality. You know, unlike the phones that sheds their skin even while shipping 😉 Nokia has added a lot of their exciting services to Windows Phone. Now you get Nokia Music with a year long subscription that gives you access to unlimited music downloads, their excellent Maps app that can take you to your favourite destinations with turn by turn voice navigation and it doesn’t end there. Nokia has also developed many other useful apps like Nokia City Lens, Creative studio, Transfer my data app, Photobeamer and more. Finally, Nokia has always been a pioneer in one more thing. That is the Camera. Nokia has included the Pureview technology in the camera for Lumia 920. This means, you get stunning photos and videos everyday from your phone’s camera.
To be honest, when I first got the Lumia 800, I got really bored of it quickly. Within a day or two, I ran out of features and exciting apps to check out. And it just remained as a regular mobile phone to me. However, Lumia 920 with the new Windows Phone 8 OS and the special Nokia apps with this stunning hardware continues to keep me amazed and excited.
The first thing you note about this phone is the huge screen. The phone comes with 4.5″ screen with Puremotion HD display. When I first heard of it, I really took it granted for a fancy name that these manufacturers come up with. However, its more than that. The screen is really crisp and sharp, thanks to the Clear Black Display. And the PureMotion HD+ display delivers a very bright screen with extra high touch sensitivity. This means, your phone can respond to your touch even when you’re wearing gloves. That’s pretty impressive.
And when you’re using the Lumia 920, you sure know there’s something about the camera that makes this phone special. So yeah, I immediately fired up the camera app after I was done checking out the display and home screen. Lumia 920 has a dedicated camera button to launch the camera app. The camera is 8.7MP to be precise and comes with Pureview technology. I took a few pictures and found them good but not blown away to be honest until I took it for a party. The party was at night and oh boy, you wouldn’t believe the results. I usually take iPhone 5 with me everywhere and we all know it takes good pictures. But the phone always fails to take good shots in low light. I usually end up with poor pictures that has more grains and uneven light distribution caused by the flash. But Lumia 920 really delivered great pictures. It has this feature called focus assist and when that’s turned on, you get some really amazing photos. Be sure to read our full review with samples.
Lumia 920 comes with 32GB memory. Yes, let’s say goodbye to the old 16GB base model phones. I think its really high time that we move to 32GB and higher for the base models. Phones these days shoot and play 1080p videos, apps and games always a few hundred megabytes and some even hit gigabytes in size. It would really be foolish of companies to not provide enough storage to fit them all in the device. It only proves how much less they know about their own product. Overall, the phone is really smooth. The Windows Phone OS is butter smooth and the accompanying hardware of the phone really makes the experience lag free. The phone also gave us impressive battery life. After all, its not that easy to use up the entire 2000mAh battery. On a decently high usage, we squeezed up more than 1.5 days where the device used WiFi all the time for internet connectivity. The phone weighs 185g. Some people call it overweight. I felt it decent. Most of all, the weight gives you a solid feel in the hands.
I’m continuously using the phone more and more to discover and experience everything that this phone has to offer. Windows Phone OS may alone won’t be tempting to many of you out there, but a Windows Phone built by Nokia is really worth considering. Nokia really completes the Windows Phone OS to a great extent. Be sure to check out our full detailed review and videos which will be published soon. Got questions ? Give us a shout out below in the comments section.
Apple launched the iPhone 5 in China last weekend and has sold a whopping 2 million units in just 3 days. Apple iPhone 5 is currently available from China’s largest mobile service provider Unicom. The company also received 100,000 pre-orders in just one day for the same when it first went live earlier this month. Some analysts did claim that iPhone 5 wouldn’t do well as iPhone 4S sales. However, the new sales figures has broken all analysts expectations. Apple CEO Tim Cook said,“China is a very important market for us and customers there cannot wait to get their hands on Apple products.”
Apple is on an iPhone 5 launch spree to get iPhone 5 to 100 countries before the year end. And they look right on schedule. Have you bought an iPhone 5 ? Or are you getting one for Christmas ?
Google has been releasing iOS apps for its mail, maps and plenty of other services. It was today that Google released its brand new Maps app for iPhone and iPod Touch which brought voice navigation and better maps experience to the users. However, if you’re on Windows Phone 8 or Windows 8 and is hoping for these apps to hit your platform, then you probably should keep your expectations low. Google may not be interested in these platforms just yet.
Clay Bavor, a Google Product Manager made it clear that they aren’t interested to invest on Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 at the moment. He said,
We have no plans to build out Windows apps. We are very careful about where we invest and will go where the users are but they are not on Windows Phone or Windows 8. If that changes, we would invest there, of course
So you may have to stick on to default ro third party apps for now until Google debuts their apps.
Pinch yourself people. It’s true. Google Maps for iOS is out. And its better. Way better than it was before. Previously when Apple licensed Google maps it did not have voice navigation. But now Google has finally released a standalone app after Apple abandoned the Google app in iOS 6. Not to forget, the Apple maps that is currently on iOS is really poor and has been collecting bad press worldwide. Google really used this opportunity to release their own maps app with exciting new features like turn by turn voice navigation and guess what it’s even available in India. The maps app lets you search for location and then route to the location using car or public transport with traffic details in supported countries.
This new Google Maps comes as a lifesaver to many or most iOS users who rely on Maps to get in to different places. If you’re not a big fan of Google Maps, you can alternatively choose Nokia Maps from AppStore. But mind you, it does not have voice navigation and retina display optimisation. But the app is universal.
In a surprising move last week, Apple launched iTunes Music store in 56 countries and movies store in 4 countries including India. Today, they launched the music store into 42 another countries. Following are the new list of countries according to MacRumors: – Europe: Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine – Africa, the Middle East and India: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, […]
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Some of you might be heartbroken to know that all your vintage photos taken via Instagram will no longer show up as a thumbnail on the twitter feeds of your friends. Instagram recently announced that they are withdrawing the Twitter card support as they intend to increase the user activity on Instagram web. Instagram web profile was rolled out to users a few weeks back. As of now, photos continue to show up on third party clients while the official ones fails to show a thumbnail.
Call it a coincidence or a planned revenge, Twitter rolled out inbuilt photo filters to its official clients on both Android and iOS earlier today. Users can now add filters to their photos before they are shared on Twitter. I guess many users will now use Instagram a little less than before.
The app brings eight filters to choose from. There’s also an auto enhance option available to quickly fix and enhance your picture. And you can also crop and pinch to zoom as well while editing.
Nokia today announced the Nokia Lumia 620, their third Windows Phone 8 device. The Lumia 620 falls to the low end category of Windows Phone 8 devices. Priced at just $249(Rs 13500 approx), the Lumia 620 comes with a 3.8 inch TFT WVGA display with 800×480 resolution, 1Ghz Dual Core Snapdragon S4 processor, 512MB RAM, 8GB of internal storage with MicroSD card slot that supports up to 64GB, a 5MP autofocus camera, a VGA front facing camera, NFC and a 1300mAh battery. The phone will also be equipped with exclusive Nokia services like Nokia Music, Nokia Maps and Nokia Drive.
The phone will start selling in January 2013 in Asia, followed by Europe and Middle East later.
It’s December and it’s almost Christmas. We are all waiting for surprises throughout out this month. And just on time, Apple announces the launch of their music store in India and 56 other countries. I can’t tell how much I’ve waited for this. I always wished if Apple stared Music store in India, but deep down I knew they wouldn’t as their focus was always on US and Europe markets. Well, not any more. iTunes music store have almost all the English songs and a lot of Hindi aka Bollywood songs. Songs are priced at Rs 12 and the albums are priced at Rs.110. Although prices for some songs and albums vary by a small amount.
Movie collections on the iTunes store are a bit underwhelming now. Both Hollywood and Bollywood collections are very limited at the moment. But its just getting started, so its a matter of time before we can see some new releases there. Movies are priced at Rs 290 if you intend to buy and at Rs 120 if you are only looking to rent. If you rent a movie, you get 30 days time to watch it. But once you hit play, you should finish watching the movie in less than 24hours. Knowing the condition of internet in India, I would recommend you to buy the movie rather than renting. Movies purchased on iTunes on computer can be watched on all your iOS devices that are registered with the same Apple ID. This also applies for music purchased from iTunes store.
iTunes Match is an interesting service from Apple. It scans your existing music library and replaces the songs with iTunes quality music from their store, the songs also get added to iCloud and then gets pushed to your other iOS devices(Manual sync is also possible). This helps you to avoid paying large amount of money to buy these songs again from iTunes store. Instead, at just Rs 1200 a year, you can have any number(25,000max) of songs added to iCloud. And the songs that you purchase there after from iTunes also gets added to iCloud. iTunes match was launched last year for US and UK stores, it was later introduced to some other markets as well. And yesterday Apple launched it in Indian store as well.
Along with India, 56 other countries also received the iTunes Music Store. They are Belarus, Moldova, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Egypt, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, India, Israel, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Swaziland, United Arab Emirates, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Fiji, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Micronesia, Mongolia, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Dominica, Grenada, St. Kitts and Nevis, Trinidad and Tobago. Only four countries got the Movies store. They are India, Indonesia, Russia and Turkey.
Android has always been my second choice to iOS. I find Android equally good as iOS or even better when it comes to customisability and a few other advanced features. But I never used an Android device as my primary device for a long period. I remember the time when I tried switching to a Galaxy SII and Galaxy Note. But it didn’t workout well. I give a lot of importance to the quality of things I use. And that’s exactly where me and Android couldn’t work things out. So we broke up. There are plenty of Android manufacturers out there in the market. I’ve lost the count. You can get Android devices at any price range. An Android device running Ice Cream Sandwich with decent hardware is now available for as low as $200. Its a good thing. But the problem is when you go high end. Even when you pay prices as high as $600-700 what you get is almost the same. Of course, there’s a bump in the hardware packaging, but there isn’t much leap forward in terms of style and build quality. I think people tend to consider all these things as we climb up the price range. We won’t be ready to compromise much at this price point. Besides, we need a differentiation. That’s why we shell out more. Same was the case with me. I wanted a device with great build quality, impressive design and performance. Although, Galaxy SII and Galaxy Note gave me the performance boost I wanted, they failed to give me the quality I wished for. That’s when I came across the announcement of the Sony branded phones. Yes, they make phones of their own now. Ericsson is no more a part of it. I saw the Xperia ION on the website and was seriously impressed with the device. It had the style I wanted, build quality looked great and the hardware was great too. So, here, check out my full review below.
Box Package:
The Xperia ION comes in slim but big package. It doesn’t follow the current style of packaging that others follow. It’s not something one should worry about anyway. The box package contains the smartphone, a microUSB data cable, a power adaptor and in-ear microphones. You’ll also find a lot manuals in many different languages that you can’t speak. Don’t worry, English manual is also included although you wouldn’t really need one to set up your phone. Sony suggests that you charge your phone at least 30minutes before using it for the first time. I would recommend a straight 2 hours charge though.
Design:
Sony’s Xperia 2012 line up has got one of the best designs of all time. I really liked the look and feel of the device in hand. And as I mentioned earlier, this is the design and quality I’ve been expecting from a high end Android device. The front side of the phone is mostly the display. Its LED backlit and measures 4.55 inches. Sony also claims it to be scratch resistant. I dare you not challenge it. You’ll also notice the front facing camera and the Sony branding on top. Towards the bottom, you’ll find the default Android soft buttons like Menu, Home Back and Search. These days most Android phones only have 3 soft buttons including its little brother Xperia S. This, however, came with four.
The top of the phone is clean with just one 3.5mm headphone jack. The power button, volume buttons and the dedicated camera button are located on the right side of the phone. The volume buttons looks a bit smaller than usual. On the left side we have the microUSB port and the micro HDMI port. They are covered with a small plastic cover so that they don’t collect dust or other particles when not in use. Its a little hassle to remove it each time when you want to charge your phone as the phone also charges through the same microUSB port. At the bottom of the phone, you’ll find nothing more than a tiny microphone. And at the back of the phone, you’ll see an aluminium casing which gives slight brushed metal look. There’s a 12MP camera on the back. Right below it you’ll notice the LED flashlight and the speaker. Towards the bottom, you’ll find the Sony Ericsson logo which is a bit confusing as Ericsson is no longer a part of Sony Mobile.
The phone feels really good in hands. In fact, it feels much better than the Xperia S which has plastic casing at the back. The aluminium casing at the back gives it a premium feel in hand. And the way they’ve designed the back is also very appealing. Its hard for someone to be unnoticed when someone walks by with this phone. It definitely is an eye turner and drool worthy. The only problem is that, Sony is making a lot of variant of these designs like Samsung did with the Galaxy. So sometimes you may feel inferior when a lower priced device looks almost the same as yours. Also this causes confusion to a lot of consumers.
Display:
One of the eye catching features of the Xperia ION is the dazzling display. It features the Sony Mobile Bravia Engine which can be assumed as the little brother of the original Bravia display seen on their range of TVs. The Bravia Mobile technology is a stand out display technology and looks amazing on this huge 4.55 inch display. With 720×1280 resolution, there’s nothing more you can ask more from this department. Pictures and videos look so amazing. I love watching videos on this display. Its so vivid and lovely. If you watch a lot of videos on the phone including movies and those from the internet, this huge screen and the Mobile Bravia Engine is going to be really useful to you. Photos look great too. With this level of clarity on the display, even the minute detail in the photo are very visible. And when you browse the internet and read tonnes of content from various websites, you’ll really thank the inclusion of 323ppi. That’s close to the Retina Display on iPhone. Reading the sharp non fuzzy text is something you can’t get tired of. I don’t usually read on small screens but I found this 4.5 inch display comfortable enough. It had the clarity and quality I wanted. And the size of the screen wasn’t too small or too big as far as reading was concerned. Plus, with Apps like Amazon Kindle, Instapaper, Flipboard and Pocket, you get a fine reading experience on the phone.
While the display quality did quite well, there were a few hiccups with it as well. The display is glossy which means you’ll see a lot of yourself on the display when you try to look at it in the sunlight. Its sometimes very annoying as you can’t concentrate on what’s on the screen. However, you can correct it to a good extend by turning on the backlight using the widgets or from the display menu under settings. But if you still find it difficult, you may just have to deal with it. Another problem, I’ve confronted with the display is that it attracts finger prints and smudges very well. There isn’t a oleo phobic coating on the Xperia ion which usually prevents the finger prints to some extend. The smudges and finger prints are notable only when the display is off. They never cause a problem when the display is on. And its not any serious problem that a soft cloth can’t solve. But its worth noting though. Sony also has a scratch resistant film on the screen. The phone ships with the film by default and it’s hardly noticeable. It’s a good addition it can prevent direct scratches on the screen to a great extend.
In short, the display is really great. It serves well for videos, web browsing and regular reading. And the Mobile Bravia Engine really lives up to the name.
Camera:
When its a phone from Sony, you really look forward to the Camera of the phone. Sony was an often spoken name in the past when it came to camera phones. It looks like they still have got the magic. The camera on the Xperia ion delivered great quality both in stills and videos. If you’re a geek who likes to fiddle around with different settings, then you’ll love the camera UI. There’s a lot of menus to customise depending on the scene you’re planning to snap. I’m no expert in the camera segment, but taking great pictures felt simple and good. There’s also a dedicated camera button on the ion. So you can immediately launch the camera using that button and use the same for snapping pictures. When you launch the camera using this button, it immediately snaps a photo automatically to ensure that you don’t miss what you want to shoot. Its a nice addition. Sometimes great moments waits for none. The camera also supports Panorama feature which is nice. It does Panorama in 3D as well. Taking Panorama photos are limited to landscape mode. When selected, turn the phone to landscape mode and start sweeping the phone from left to right by default or change the direction of sweeping to up, down or right.
When you take photos in 12MP clarity, they have a ratio of 4:3 which will look letter boxed on widescreen TVs and displays including your phone. So, you can choose to snap photos in 9MP clarity which takes photos in 16:9. So your photos look great as they fill up the entire screen of the aforementioned devices. Here are a few photos we took with the Xperia ion. The clarity and detail is amazing. I didn’t have to dive in to camera settings much to achieve this quality. Everything was set to default and focus was set to Touch to focus for close-up shots. I’m really impressed with the clarity. They also looked good on the big screen.
The phone also does great full HD videos. The videos recorded are at 30fps and obviously at 1080p. The quality is great. The audio clarity on the videos also require special mention. The audio sounded pretty good when I took a sample outside the house where the surroundings was a little noisy. The video is embedded below for your judgement.
While recording video you get the option to shoot using the front camera or the back camera. You can also choose different scenes, adjust exposure levels and keep flashlight on if situation demands it. These settings have to selected before you begin to capture. The video sample here is the same place where we shot our iPhone 5 camera sample as well. If you would like to see how good that is, click here.
Software:
Xperia Ion runs Ice Cream Sandwich out of the box and is scheduled to get Jellybean in early 2013. Ice Cream Sandwich powered with Sony’s Timescale UI gives you a very good experience with the phone. The Timescape UI is very rich and gives more standard look to the software. It also brings a few customisations and some apps in the package. You’ll find apps like the smart connect, Track ID, Play Now and more. These are extra software additions that are exclusive to Sony devices. Icons and animations in the Timescape UI is also eye candy. Sony has also integrated major social media services in to the Timescape UI to give you a much better experience. If you compare it with Touchwhiz UI on the Samsung Galaxy series, the Timescape looks far more superior in style. However, if you try to compare it side by side with the number of features, then Touchwhiz UI may have some lead. But that may be negligible to many. As for apps, you can enjoy all of the great apps that are available from Android’s Play Store. Apps run quite fast on this Xperia hardware. I didn’t experience any kind of lags or much delays while multitasking either. With Android’s Play Store matching Apple AppStore in the total number of apps, you will hardly find yourself returning from the Play store without finding a new app to try out.
As I mentioned above, the Timescape UI really makes the Android experience stylish. The theme of the UI is elegant and there a couple of themes you can choose as well to match your mood and style. Timescape has given the music player a massive facelift compared to Google’s stock music player. The music player on Xperia Ion lets you switch between songs by swiping the album art left/right. The album arts are beautifully stacked and the music player’s background adjusts its colour to match the most dominating colour on the artwork that’s being played. You can also easily choose Play On feature to wirelessly play the music to your home theatre system. This feature uses DLNA technology to stream music to other devices. Hence, make sure you’re connected to the same WiFi network as the device to which you’re streaming. The Gallery app is also beautiful. It displays all your photos as thumbnails beautifully arranged and some thumbnails really stand out of the collection. The size of thumbnails can be adjusted by pinching in and out from the gallery value which is really cool. As usual, you’ll also find a plethora of options to share your photos or edit them using another app.
There’s also a dedicated app for accessing all your social content like Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare etc. It pulls all the updates from all these networks and shows them in one place in a stacked UI. In landscape orientation, they beautifully re-orients to form a cover flow like UI. Other apps inlcude Back Up and Restore app that creates back up of the phone contents to restore later at any case of data loss and wipe off. Sony also has a software, something I would like to describe as an intelligent software that can act according to certain situations if preset. For example, you can assign it to run the music player when you connect the earphones. Or you can set it to run the Back Up and Restore app when you connect it to a charger etc. The app is called LiveWare manager and works flawlessly. Sony also has included the Track ID app that works pretty similar to Shazam or Soundhound. The app can listen to music and then fetch you the song details in seconds. It also provides link to the purchase the song online which is cool. Talking about music, if you fall in to any supported countries of Sony’s Music and Video unlimited service, then you can enjoy great collection of song and videos right on your phone. It’s really interesting to see what Sony has done to Android using Timescape UI. The phone is expected to get Jelly Bean soon in early 2013 as Sony is now customising the same with Timescape.
Sony also has a PC client and a Mac client to sync your phone with computer. We used it with a Mac and the client Sony Bridge for Mac worked quite perfectly. You can easily sync music from iTunes, sync photos from iPhoto or even import the photos from your phone to computer. You can also explore files on the phone using the app. During our period of review, we also received a firmware update via the client and the phone was updated easily without any failures or other hassles.
To conclude, we loved the Xperia Ion. It’s got a gorgeous design, a big feature set and perfect software that can give you a smooth experience, plus some Sony exclusive services. However, if you’re not a fan of big phones, then this may not be the one for you. Its got a 4.5 inch display which may not suite everyone. Not to mention, the audio output from the speaker was also underwhelming. It wasn’t really clear and there were a lot of noise during playback. That aside, the phone is great considering the Mobile Bravia display, 12MP camera and decent battery life that can easily get you through a day easily. Sony Xperia Ion is priced at Rs 30,000/- approximately.
In a surprising turn of events, Nokia, today announced that they will be introducing their Nokia Maps’ iOS app under the newly adopted brand name HERE. Here is the new face of Nokia Maps. Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said, “People want great maps, and with HERE we can bring together Nokia’s location offering […]
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