Nokia and Microsoft introduced the flagship Nokia Lumia 920 and the lower-end Lumia 820, devices with advanced camera, display and charging technologies.
Nokia
and partner Microsoft on Sept. 5 introduced the Nokia Lumia 920 and Nokia
Lumia 820, the first Nokia smartphones to run Windows Phone 8. The two
companies are making these smartphones their next major effort to carve out
market share in a space dominated by Android-running devices and the Apple
iPhone.
With the two new smartphones, Nokia is emphasizing
technologies related to the display, the camera and charging, as well as
focusing on exclusive applications. In a demonstration, the camera technology
in particular-which uses stabilization technology that allows the camera's
shutter to stay open longer and so offer brighter, crisper shots at night,
without introducing blur from finite hand movements-was impressive. Nokia says
the Lumia 920 can take shots that used to be reserved for stand-alone SLR
cameras.
But it will remain to be seen whether the devices, which are
ultimately very similar in appearance to the original Lumia phones, can bring
about necessary, aggressive changes for the phone maker.
Of course,
Apple
was criticized for following the iPhone 4 with the 4S, instead of a much
different-looking iPhone 5, and the 4S still became the company's best-selling
model.
The flagship Lumia 920 features a 4.5-inch curved-glass
PureMotion HD+ Super Sensitive touch display that responds to the touch of
fingernails and gloved hands, as well as bare fingertips-another stand-alone
feature-and offers enhanced readability in bright sunlight.
It has a 2,000mAh battery with integrated QI wireless
charging-Nokia also showed off a line of accessories to display and enhance
this feature-a 8.7MP camera with Nokia PureView image-stabilization technology and
a 1.2MP camera with 720 high-definition video for video calls. There's 1GB of
RAM on board, 32GB of mass memory and 7GB of free SkyDrive storage.
The Lumia 920 will come in yellow, red, gray, white and
black, in Long-Term Evolution (LTE) and Evolved High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA+)
variants, and will feature near-field communications (NFC) technology, enabling
it to do things like pair with a JBL speaker to stream music from the Nokia
Music app while the device sits atop the speaker, wirelessly charging.
The lower-end Lumia 820 features a 4.3-inch ClearBlack OLED
WVGA with Super Sensitive touch technology and the sunlight readability
enhancements. Both phones run a 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 that Jo Harlow,
Nokia's vice president of Smart Devices, said is 30 percent more efficient than
quad-core alternatives.
The battery is a 1,650mAh with Qi wireless charging, there's
an 8MP camera on the back, a VGA camera up-front, and 8GB of mass memory plus
the free 7GB of SkyDrive storage. In addition to the 920's color options, it
will also come in cyan and purple.
Pricing and carrier information is still to come.
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