Nokia Lumia 720 review

The keystone to Nokia's Windows Phone 8 onslaught

Nokia Lumia 720 review
The middle kid has its say

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The Nokia Lumia 720 isn't blessed with superfast 4G connectivity, meaning you'll have to resort to a 3G connection if you fancy roaming outside of a Wi-Fi connection.

Nokia Lumia 720 review

In terms of actually viewing the web on the Lumia 720 you've got just one option - Internet Explorer (IE).

IE is an unfussy offering giving you all the basic tools required for surfing the world wide web, but none of the added extras you find on other operating systems.

If you're making the switch from Android or iOS you'll note there's no URL bar at the top of screen, with Microsoft opting to stick it at the base instead. Why? We're not quite sure, but it's not really a problem and you'll get used to its placement pretty quickly.

It's accompanied by a reload button, but any other controls are hidden away in the menu - which can be accessed by tapping the three small dots to the right of the URL box.

From the menu you can open up any number of tabs, allowing you to surf more than one website at a time - but unfortunately there's no easy way to jump between these tabs, or see how many you have open.

Nokia Lumia 720 review

This slows the browsing experience down a bit and is rather frustrating if you need to jump between several tabs quickly.

Nokia Lumia 720 review

You'll also a find favourites, browsing history and settings in the menu - the latter of which gives you a variety of options including changing the default search engine from Bing to Google.

Over 3G load speeds tended to hover around the four to six seconds mark for mobile sites, while content heavy sites were a bit more of a struggle taking around 15 seconds to fully appear - although we could pan around after about 8 seconds.

In some extreme cases we found that content rich sites could take up to half a minute to fully render on screen, so you may want to stick to mobile sites when using the Lumia 720 out and about.

Popping onto a half decent Wi-Fi network saw load times reduced by a few seconds for both mobile and desktop sites, which is to be expected.

Nokia Lumia 720 review

As the Nokia Lumia 720 comes equipped with a 4.3-inch display there's plenty of real estate to play with when it comes to browsing the web, which makes viewing sites and reading articles far easier.

You can tell the screen on the Lumia 720 does suffer a little thanks to its resolution, with images not looking as clear, and text not quite as sharp. It certainly doesn't make things unreadable, but if you take a second to stop and look you will notice the slight lack of quality.

There's no text reflow built into Internet Explorer though, so once you've zoomed in to read an article you'll find yourself feverishly sliding sideways as well as down to read all the text.

For those of you who are still avid Flash fans then there's disappointment in store for you here as the Lumia 720 doesn't support the dying format, meaning various websites and videos simply won't work.

John McCann
Former Global Managing Editor

TechRadar's former Global Managing Editor, John has been a technology journalist for more than a decade, and over the years has built up a vast knowledge of the tech industry. He’s interviewed CEOs from some of the world’s biggest tech firms, visited their HQs, and appeared on live TV and radio, including Sky News, BBC News, BBC World News, Al Jazeera, LBC, and BBC Radio 4.

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