The Nokia Lumia Icon (also known as the 929), is a 5-inch, quad-core smartphone with a 20-megapixel camera and a pretty darn good look and feel. While it may not be the biggest and baddest kid on the Windows Phone block, the Icon has features and specs that make it a strong contender for any Verizon superphone shopper, and at the top of the Windows Phone crop this year.
Design
The Icon has more square contours than other Lumia models, and its a bit smaller than say the Lumia 928, 1020 or the 1520. A slightly curved back adds comfort to your grip, and an aluminum rim adds some premium aesthetics to the polycarbonate backing.
The Icon measures 5.4 inches tall by 2.8 inches wide, and at 0.4-inches thick, it’s a 5.9-ounce slab of a phone, but it’s comfortable enough to hold and use without complaint. Speaking of no complaints, the 5-inch 1080p HD AMOLED screen is goregeous. It has 441ppi pixel density, a lot of brightness and super rich colors, making photos, videos, and high-definition images jump off the screen. Nokia’s ClearBlack Display filter cuts down on glare outside, and the curved Gorilla Glass helps tremendously with various viewing angles.
On the right edge, you’ll find buttons for the camera shutter, power and volume. At the base is the charging port, and at the top is your headset port and the SIM slot. On the back contains the 20-megapixel camera module and dual-LED flash. The front-facing camera rests above the screen, to the right of the speaker grill. Four microphones satisfy your audio requirements, one each at the top and bottom of the front and back sides. The only thing missing on the icon is the absence of a microSD slot and a replaceable battery.
Software
The ICON sports a three column interface, courtesy of the Windows Phone 8 Update 3 OS version, along with the Nokia Black software update, which adds a bunch of Nokia apps and also support for low-energy Bluetooth. One good thing about the Windows Phone interface is that it offers stuff like music identification, voice actions and multi-tasking. There’s also NFC, Integrated Qi wireless charging, Bluetooth 4.o, GPS and Wi-Fi. It also has Microsoft Office suite, cool apps like Drive+navigation, Nokia Beamer, MixRadio, Nokia Here Maps, Bing apps, and very cool camera apps for panorama and editing.
Windows Phone has a cluttered but clean-looking OS, with Xbox and Office integration, but it’s still tough to use. There’s too damn much on the home screen. It’s crowded, and doesn’t hold a candle to the usability of iOS and Android. Windows is grabbing a little marketshare, but the last 4 years has seen relatively slow growth.
Camera
The 20-megapixel camera sensor is strong, and it also includes a six-lens Carl Zeiss optical assembly and optical image stabilization. Nokia’s camera features are unique because the company uses a technique called oversampling to capture a 5-megapixel image at the same time it stores a 16-megapixel copy. When you crop and zoom in, you take advantage of the full-resolution image, which you can store in the default 16:9 aspect ratio, or as a 4:3 ratio (19-megapixel). The camera also has an f/2.4 aperture.
Image quality is great, with detailed and crisp production. The camera also handles macros and close-ups pretty well, and the Nokia’s Pro Cam app is the installed as a default, which gives you some extra functionality and photo manipulation to play with. Colors are on-point in natural lighting, but get a little gray under artificial light.
Shot-to-shot time is a little slow due to the extra processing required to save two versions of an image. The Icon also has a 2-megapixel camera on its front side, but you’ll only get that, along with 720 HD resolution, when video chatting. Still shots only produce 1.2-megapixel images.
Video is also a shining point with the Icon, delivering an eyeful of vibrant detail and color, and optical image stabilization is onboard to steady your hand. 1080p HD video capture is as strong as usual, and records at a rate of 30 frames per second. The directional audio speakers makes sounds more realistic.
Call Quality, Battery and Performance
Voice quality leaves a little to be desired. While it’s loud with little backgroud noise, voices sometimes sound muffled and a bit distorted. The speaker phone is decent, but again, some of the receiver problems were also present with the speaker quality.
Processing performance, however, is super fast with websites and apps downloading quickly. The Lumia Icon is the second Windows phone to feature a quad-core processor, a 2.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 (MSM8974), with an Adreno 330 GPU. This is pretty close to the top of the line, though it won’t be long before quad-core phones are obsolete.
The Icon sports a 2,420mAh battery, which will hold you over for a full day of heavy use, and 16GB ROM, 2GB RAM and 32GB of internal storage is adequate for nearly anyone these days. Plus, Windows phones come with an additional 7GB in free SkyDrive storage, if you sign up.
Bottom Line
The Nokia Lumia Icon by Verizon combines the high-powered features of the Lumia 1520 with a smaller 5-inch screen, and in my book, it’s the best Windows Phone around… which isn’t saying a whole lot. I’m not a super fan of Windows Phones, simply because they’re too hard to use, and too hard to navigate. Having said that, the ICON sports a great display, arrestingly sharp colors, fantastic camera and SPEED! If call quality and slim design are deal breakers for you, however, you may want to look at something else.
The Icon runs around $200 with a 2-year contract through Verizon. Its faults are minimal, and its strengths are evident. You can purchase it here.
This review unit was provided by Verizon for review, and no compensation has been given for the above opinions or content
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