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Call quality has far more to do with your carrier and signal strength than the phone itself. Since this is a Verizon phone, and Verizon is a very solid network in the San Francisco Bay Area, you'd be correct in guessing that call quality was excellent.
Calls from our friends sounded loud and clear, and they reported the same of us. Speakerphone calls were pretty good, too, but difficult to hear in louder environments.
Even in areas with less than stellar service, like up in the mountains, calls still sounded pretty great. We'll chalk that up to Verizon's network more than the phone itself, but at least we know the device is still going to be plenty loud up until we lose signal entirely.
Now that call quality is out of the way, let's have a quick word about 4G LTE performance. Depending on where we were in the city, speeds ranged from 5Mbps to 15Mbps download, and 2Mbps to 8Mbps upload. Those aren't the fastest speeds we've seen on any particular carrier or handset, but it's more than fast enough.
We know Verizon can get much faster than that, so it's likely that the areas we tested in weren't the optimal spots for peak LTE speeds. Still, anything that required mobile data worked better than just fine.
Battery life
Battery life is solid for the Lumia Icon. Of course, when you have a 2,420 mAh battery, you would hope that battery life is good.
We could have done with a little more time on the clock, but the Lumia lasted a solid day with a single charge. A day typically starts around 8 a.m. and ends at 10 p.m. By the end of it, we had about 25% battery life left, which is great.
During our use, we had Toast notifications turned on, so we'd get push notifications for Twitter messages, Facebook notifications and Facebook Messenger messages. Along with shooting photos, making some phone calls and having two e-mail accounts set up, we also streamed a lot of music via Spotify. The Lumia Icon took it like a champ.
There was one or two days when it was in desperate need of a charge around 6 p.m., but those days might have included periods of time with a very weak network signal.
