Review: Nokia Lumia 820

Nokia had launched the Lumia 820 in India along with Lumia 920 and 620 this year in January 2013. Nokia 820 has been aimed to fit between the high end Nokia lumia 920 and the low end Nokia Lumia 620 in the Windows Phone 8 segment. But has it been able to provide a good smart phone experience? Is WP8 any good? Read our review below to find answers.

Box contents:

If you guys remember the campaign started by Nokia India few years back featuring Shahrukh Khan saving the mother earth asking to recycle their old handsets. Since then Nokia has adopted recyclable boxes for their devices protecting the nature.

The Lumia 820 comes in a recyclable box consisting of:

• Lumia 820 handset
• Battery
• Earbuds
• Power Adapter
• USB cable

We had posted an unboxing video few days ago, giving an audio visual insight of the box contents. To watch the video click here.

Build:

Nokia has never been disappointing when it comes to build of any handset. Unlike the Nokia Lumia 920, the Lumia 820 is not unibody.

Nokia has done a fairly good job on the design with plastic coating on the front and the polycarbonate panel on the back. Unboxing the retail package, we first saw the Lumia 820 handset with a 4.3 inch WVGA AMOLED screen with Nokia ClearBlack display.

There resides an earpiece, the Nokia branding along with a secondary camera on the front top.

Alike every windows phone this too has the typical three capacitive buttons – return, windows and the search key. Note that the windows logo has been changed to that of the windows phone 8.

Flipping on the back, the polycarbonate panel do feel of some good quality but Nokia has made it difficult to remove. You have to force a nail between the display and the panel towards top right and then hope that it doesn’t break your nail. On the back, there is the 8MP camera along with the dual LED flash on the top and the Nokia branding at the bottom.

The left edge is completely clean whereas right edge houses the volume rocker, power button and the dedicated camera key.

There is a 3.5mm audio output on the top and a loudspeaker and microUSB port at the bottom.

Hardware:

The specifications looks quite impressive on paper. Nokia Lumia 820 measures 123.8 x 68.5 x 9.9 mm, 83.5 cc (4.87 x 2.70 x 0.39 in) in dimensions and 160 g in weight. It features a 4.3-inch WVGA screen with the resolution of 480X800 pixels which counts out to be 217 ppi on a AMOLED Nokia ClearBlack Display. It is powered by a Qualcomm MSM8960 Snapdragon chipset which has a 1.5 GHz dual core Krait processor and Adreno 225 GPU. It supports HSDPA, 42 Mbps; HSUPA, 5.76 Mbps; LTE, Cat3, 50 Mbps UL, 100 Mbps DL along with dual band WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n NFC and Bluetooth v3.1 with A2DP, EDR. It runs on 1GB RAM with 8GB internal memory and supports expandable memory storage upto 64GB via a microSD card slot. The windows phone 8 handset comes with a 1650 mAh battery which suffices basic needs.

Though HD displays are in trend these days and people might look the WVGA display as a drawback, but it as actually not the case. While during testing this device, we found that the overall display quality is quite acceptable. The Nokia ClearBlack technology help the colors look rich and text crisp.

Camera:

The 8 MP camera on this handset is supported by Carl Zeiss optics with autofocus and dual LED flash. The 8MP is definitely better than Lumia 800 and Lumia 900 especially the low-light conditions where the noise ruined great shots. Even in day-light the camera performed well too with adequate color richness. The video recording can be shot up to 1080p, but you have to manually set that because the default is 720p.

Here we have the Comicon Delhi coverage from Lumia 820:

Software:

Nokia Lumia 820 runs on the Windows Phone 8 mobile operating system. With the kind of hardware available on the device the mobile OS literally flies. No more slow downs or lags or waiting for the applications to load etc. System performance has been massively improved when it comes to comparing with the earlier version of the mobile operating system, at least we feel this. With the features like multi-core processor support and expandable memory windows phone 8 is now somewhat coming near to participate in the league. The app ecosystem still needs a lot of effort, the store lacks a big amount of quality apps. Microsoft should do something of the same kind like what BlackBerry did for encouraging developers to work for the OS.

Conclusion:

Nokia Lumia 820 is no doubt a very proficient device. With such an impressive hardware and even WP8 performing unto that level this is definitely worth recommending. Lumia 920 gaining all the attention have made this just a annotation along with it. The 4.3-inch screen and round edges makes it comfortable to use with one hand. Though Nokia 820 is the mid range WP8 handset, it is still priced high. 27,500 for this device is too much, we had expected it to launch somewhat near HTC 8S.

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