Nokia Lumia 920 review

Battery life

The Nokia Lumia 920 houses a non-removable 2,000mAh battery, which is a touch smaller than the one in the Samsung Galaxy S3 and HTC One X+, but larger than both the iPhone 5 and HTC 8X.

Nokias of old, such as the 3310 and 8210, were famous for their long battery life, but that was back in the days of black and white screens and basic calls and texts; phones these days are tasked with lasting more than 24 hours between charges.

Sadly if you're expecting some wonderful news here, you're going to be disappointed, as while the Lumia 920 makes a better stab and seeing out the day than the HTC 8X, it still suffers come the evening and ends up limping to the power point.

With careful usage you will be able to get a whole days use out of the Nokia Lumia 920, but if you actually want to use you brand new phone for more than just a couple of calls and few texts you'll need to watch the battery.

We found around an hour of sat nav usage severely dented the battery, as did watching a full length film – however we'll admit we had the screen brightness turned up pretty high.

Unlike on Android there's no battery application giving you a breakdown of the apps and features which are hogging the power, nor a fancy graph which shows you the exact minute your phone decided to fall off a cliff.

Instead in the settings menu is the battery saving option, allowing you to eke out some precious extra time on Lumia 920, plus showing what percentage of life you have left – but that's your lot.

In short the Lumia 920 does give a better performance than the two HTC handsets mentioned above, but it fails to keep up with the Galaxy S3 and iPhone 5.

Wireless charging

Wireless charging still sounds a little bit like witchcraft to us, but the Nokia Lumia 920 comes equipped with this fancy new mechanism which is yet to take the smartphone world by storm.

You will need to purchase a separate charging pad to take advantage of this feature, with Nokia's own brand plate setting you back an amount somewhere around the $100 mark, but at least you get the choice of five colours; blue, red, yellow, white and black.

The Lumia 920 uses the internationally recognised Qi wireless charging standard, meaning it will also work with other charging plates which are hopefully more reasonably priced.

The black Nokia charging plate we were providing with for our test was an attractive bed side accompaniment, but a word of warning the plug itself is big, really big, so if your power sockets are in difficult to access location you may have a bit of a fight on your hands.

All that aside, we're big fans of the wireless charging ability, as it puts an end to fumbling around in the dark for a cable and then taking 20 attempts to finally get it plugged in – popping the Lumia 920 down on its plate is just a more pleasing experience.

Connectivity

The Nokia Lumia 920 is as you'd expect a well connected device, with all the major players involved.

Kicking us off are the old reliables Wi-Fi b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.1 and A-GPS, although mobile connectivity has been given a boost with 4G support on the Lumia 920. The dual-channel Wi-Fi also allows faster connection speeds when you're struggling with interference around the old abode.

In addition to these there's also the new kid on the connectivity block in the form of NFC, the contactless technology which is slowing making itself heard in the mobile market.

Tap the Lumia 920 against another NFC enabled device and you'll be able to share things like music and photos instantly.

Nokia has not stopped at allowing you to transfer content between smartphones though, as there's also a range of NFC enabled accessories including speakers and stereos, which allow you to transfer you tunes onto a bigger rig for room filling sound.

DLNA streaming is also supported on the Nokia Lumia 920, and you can easily stream from the handset to an Xbox 360 console using the Smart Glass application.

Fire up Smart Glass on the Lumia 920 plus your Xbox and the app will connect to the console, as long as they are on the same Wi-Fi network, allowing you to do a number of things.

Firstly you can use the Lumia 920 as a controller, skipping round the homescreens of the Xbox and selecting various options.

You can start browsing the web on your smartphone, and then transfer the browsing experience onto the TV via the Xbox console and of course you can also stream music and video to the console, allowing you to enjoy films you may have stored on the phone on a larger screen.

It's a clever app and while it does take a little while to start up and connect each time, Microsoft has done a good job with it and it's interesting to think what it might be able to do in the future.