Welcome to The After Math, where we attempt to summarize this week’s tech news through numbers, decimal places and percentages
As we scratch our head and puzzle over the almost-daily financial results for the last quarter, this week’s missive takes a slightly sentimental look at how two tech companies were faring a decade earlier. Is it unfair to compare the yesteryear Nokia to Google? Possibly. But it was the same year that a certain Engadget regular claimed a best-selling album — so it wasn’t all bad. Toshiba also unveiled a new pin-sharp Ultrabook to stand up to Apple’s Retina displays, and NASA continued the search for habitable planets.
It was just the other day that many customers online have realized that handsets such as the Nokia Lumia 810 and the HTC 8X are no longer available via T-Mobile’s website, leaving many to speculate about the fate of either device. Thanks to the folks at TmoNews, they have managed to get their hands on what looks like a leaked document from the carrier, indicating that the Nokia Lumia 810 will be reaching an end of life status in May. However considering that the handset was removed from T-Mobile’s site in April, they are speculating that either the handset was removed early, or the carrier has run out of inventory and they have no plans of restocking, especially since we are only a couple of weeks away from May, the handset’s supposed EOL status.
No word on the HTC 8X as TmoNews’ source has informed them that there is no EOL date attached to the phone just yet. In any case the document also points to the successor of the Lumia 810 – the Lumia 521 which was announced back in February during MWC 2013. For those who forgot, the Lumia 521 will pack a 4” 800×480 display with 512MB of RAM, 8GB of storage, a 5MP camera with HD video capture, and HSPA+ 21Mbps connectivity.
According to a previously reported rumor, the Nokia Lumia 928 for Verizon is said to be announced on the 25th of April, putting an end to the speculation once and for all. Interestingly though despite the alleged Verizon exclusivity, Nokia Malaysia has released a new teaser video in which they are teasing a possible handset announcement also on the 25th of April, leading us to wonder what it might be – could this be an announcement for a Lumia 928 variant for other parts of the world? The video itself is pretty scary and it is definitely attention-grabbing, and there are a couple of possibilities here.
For starters, the earlier rumor might have gotten the dates mixed up and could have gotten confused with Nokia’s 25th April announcement in Malaysia for the Lumia 928 announcement. It is also possible that like what we said above, the 25th of April could also see a Lumia 928 variant announced for the rest of the world (or Asia). Last but not least, it is possible that it might have nothing to do with the Lumia 928 and could be the launch of other Lumia devices for Malaysia and the 25th of April date is merely a coincidence. Either way we’ll keep our eyes peeled, but if you have a couple of seconds to spare, check the teaser out in the video above.
We’ve been hearing about the Nokia Lumia 928 that is expected for a launch on Verizon, with Nokia’s CEO himself confirming that a “new Nokia Lumia” will be launched this quarter, but when exactly will that be? Could we be looking at the very last day of the quarter, towards the middle, etc.? Well according to a recent rumor, we might have ourselves a date to look forward to which is the 25th of April. This is apparently a date tipped off via an anonymous tipster, with he/she going even further and claiming that the handset should be available for purchase either on the 2nd of May or the 9th of May.
Like we said, this is merely a rumor for now but it’s probably the most specific date we have. Take it with a grain of salt, but for those who are excited about the Verizon-exclusive Nokia Lumia 928, the 25th of April is a date you’ll want to mark down on your calendars. We will definitely be keeping an eye out, and with less than a week to the 25th, we guess we won’t have to wait too long to see if this rumor pans out.
Flickering hospital lights. A man going ballistic in a padded cell. A hooded ghoul. These are the images Nokia Malaysia wants to put into our heads in the run-up to a mysterious Lumia-related launch coming on April 25th. That date has also been linked to Verizon’s launch of the Lumia 928, but we’re not sure how that might be relevant. Alternatively, it could be a countdown to the Malaysian launch of the Lumia 720 or Lumia 520. The thing is, we’re intimately familiar with both those handsets and neither can be described as even remotely spooky. Unless it’s another Batman Edition?
Update: The video on Nokia’s official YouTube channel has been pulled. We’ve added a different embed in the hope of preserving this curious piece of marketing for future generations.
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours — all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
It’s Nokia’s cheapest Windows Phone 8 device, takes the company’s latest range to five models, and borrows some of the style from its bigger siblings, but can the Lumia 520 compete with cheap Android? Unveiled alongside the Lumia 720 at Mobile World Congress, the 520 slots in at the entry-level with a few compromises along the way to reach its sub-€150 unsubsidized price. Have the cut corners left the baby Lumia lacking? Read on for our review.
Hardware
Cheap doesn’t always mean cheerful, though Nokia has some impressive form in the segment: its track record in squeezing the best margins out of its production lines has resulted in surprising gems like the Lumia 620. For the Lumia 520, you get a Snapdragon S4 dualcore running at 1GHz and 512MB of RAM, just like the 720, as well as 8GB of onboard storage and a microSD card slot to add to it.
Connectivity omits LTE – something we can forgive given the price – and tops out at dualband HSDPA (up to 21.1Mbps down, 5.76Mbps up, network depending); there’s also WiFi b/g/n and Bluetooth 3.0. No NFC, though, which means no tap-to-pair with wireless speakers, and there’s unsurprisingly no wireless charging option either. Nokia tells us it expects people to step up to the Lumia 720 if that’s something they’re keen on.
Nokia’s design lineage takes another mild deviation for the Lumia 520, with the interchangeable casing being a simple snap-on affair without the bevels of the 720 or the dual-colors of the 620. It feels plasticky and somewhat hollow to the tap, too, while the broader screen bezels mean that, despite having a mere 4-inch display (running at WVGA), the phone is only very slightly narrower than the 4.3-inch 720.
That’s not the only screen-related compromise. Nokia’s Clear Black technology hasn’t filtered down to this level yet, and so the Lumia 520 makes do with a regular LCD panel instead. The result is weaker viewing angles and less impressive outdoor visibility, though Windows Phone’s bold colors do their best to keep the UI clean. Best, though, is the extra-sensitive touchscreen, which means you can use the 520 while wearing gloves.
Software
Windows Phone 8 on the Lumia 520 differs little from what we saw on the Lumia 720, with identical performance courtesy of the same internal components. It remains a great OS for the first-time smartphone user, cleanly laid out, but with the Live Tiles – which can show upcoming calendar appointments, gallery previews, and those contacts with new updates on social media – allowing for enough flexibility for power-users missing traditional widgets.
The Nokia software suite is broadly the same, too, with a couple of changes to accommodate the 520′s hardware. Since there’s no digital compass – only A-GPS and Glonass – you don’t get the LiveSight augmented reality City Lens functionality baked into HERE Maps, though there’s still turn-by-turn navigation (with offline mapping support) for the UK and Ireland. Nokia Transit is also included.
At this price point, though, the biggest sell may well be Nokia Music. The free streaming playlists – complete with offline support for a limited number of playlists, unless you sign up to the subscription Music+ service – have real appeal for buyers on a budget. It makes even more sense when you consider that, in the UK, the Lumia 520 is being offered free on a £7.99 a month agreement, less than a Spotify premium subscription.
Camera
At 5-megapixels, the Lumia 520′s camera is unsurprisingly humble. There’s an f/2.4 lens but none of the Carl Zeiss optics that we know from more expensive Nokia phones, and cost cutting has meant the LED flash is omitted too. The 520 is also the only model in the company’s new line-up not to get a front-facing camera, which means no Skype video calls.
Just as we found with the Lumia 620′s 5-megapixel shooter, quality is mixed. Given sufficient natural light, the Lumia 520 does a reasonable job, though there’s plenty of noise and blur to be found when you view shots at their full 2592 x 1936 resolution. Low-light performance suffers, though, with noise and colors underwhelming.
As for video, that tops out at 720p HD, but the results aren’t too hot. Moving objects aren’t jerky but they do encounter some blur, while the audio quality is somewhat tinny.
A minor frustration was how the camera shortcut button works. As on all Windows Phones, holding down the dedicated key on the side of the Lumia 520 loads up the camera app – bypassing the lockscreen – but the budget Nokia proved a little slower to be ready for a shot than its Lumia 720 sibling. We also had some issues with the physical alignment of the button when clipping the battery cover back on.
Phone and Battery
Nokia rates the Lumia 520′s removable 1,430 mAh battery as good for up to 9.6hrs of 3G talk time or 360hrs of standby; your calls will be clear and strong, too, with no issues in audio quality that we encountered.
In typical use, with a mixture of push-email, some Nokia Music playback, internet browsing, Nokia Maps, and photography, the Lumia 520 comfortably made it through a full day and into a second before we needed to reach for the charger.
Wrap-Up
Things are getting tight in Nokia’s Windows Phone line-up, with increasingly small differentiators between different models for different price points. Although that makes for potential confusion in the consumer marketplace, Nokia tells us it pays dividends for Lumia’s enterprise adoption: one of the goals of the 520, for instance, was to make a device for those on the factory floor that runs the same OS as management staff use on their Lumia 820 and 920 phones, but cheap and resilient enough to survive the inevitable drops and scrapes of working life.
Does that mean the Lumia 520 isn’t intended for the rest of us? Some of the compromises – the absence of a front-facing camera, notably, and the mediocre hand-feel – do leave us leaning toward the Lumia 620. It may be slightly more expensive, but it looks and feels better, is more flexible, and while the screen is slightly smaller, it offers the same resolution along with the quality improvements of Clear Black.
If low-cost is your guiding star, though, the Lumia 520 is impressive for the price, and the value-add of Nokia’s software and services isn’t to be sniffed at either.
Nokia Lumia smartphones are a result of a billion dollar deal between the Finnish manufacturer and Microsoft. Nokia buried its own operating system in favor of Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform. The entire smartphone line is built on this very platform, and it is doing quite well. Considering that Lumia 920 is the best selling Windows Phone device, its not unexpected to see that Nokia Lumia sales hit a new record this past quarter.
In its Q1 2013 earnings report Nokia states that it sold 5.6 million Lumia smartphones, a big increase from the previous quarter in which it sold 4.4 million Lumias. It also mentions in the report that two thirds of all Lumia devices sold in Q1 2013 were running on Windows Phone 8. Despite global sales being at a record high, Nokia has taken a hit in the U.S. market. Only 400,000 devices were shipped, causing a 33% year on year decline. The U.S. market is dominated largely by Apple and Samsung, though Nokia is trying hard to capture a substantial piece of the market. Nokia’s upcoming Verizon Lumia 928 launch might help boosting its share in this particular market.
Nokia’s Lumia range is, depending on those you ask, either getting crowded or becoming more flexible, with the new Lumia 720 slotting in-between the 620 and the older 820. With its 4.3-inch screen adding up to a pocket-friendly size, the Lumia 720 makes a strong argument for the Windows Phone midrange. Still, we’ve already praised the Lumia 620 for punching above its station, so does the 720 really carve out enough of a difference to make it worth consideration? Read on for the full review.
Hardware
Nokia’s familial design language is clear in the Lumia 720, and it’s one of the more pleasing handsets to look at and hold in the company’s range. Narrower sides but wider top and bottom bezels make for a phone that’s slimmer but longer than the Lumia 820 it most closely resembles, though the 720 shaves 0.9 mm off the depth (taking it down to 9 mm).
There’s a compromise involved in that, though, which is that while wireless charging is an option, it’s not baked into the Lumia 720 natively. Instead, you have to slot the phone into a secondary skin, which makes contact with a row of pin-connectors running along the lower section of the rear. Then, it’s compatible with any Qi-compliant wireless charger, including Nokia’s own accessories; unfortunately, Nokia didn’t have the adapter shell available for us to test.
Bare, it’s a sturdy unibody with a smooth, matte finish; the red of our review unit is particularly fetching, but Nokia will also offer the 720 in white, cyan, yellow, and black. A Micro SIM-tray on the upper edge means Nokia can keep the back cover fixed – which also means no removable battery – while on the right side there’s the usual volume rocker, power/lock key, and camera shortcut. A microUSB port is on the bottom edge, and finally another pop-out tray on the left for a microSD card slot (to add to the 8GB of internal storage).
Nokia has been pushing two screen technologies of late, Clear Black for better contrast and outdoor usability, and increased sensitivity for the touchscreen meaning it will work even when you’re wearing gloves. Both are present on the Lumia 720′s 4.3-inch panel, a bright and colorful screen let down only by its mediocre resolution. At WVGA, rather than 720p, you miss out on the smoothness we’ve seen on other, more expensive phones. Admittedly, the effect is diluted somewhat by the smaller size overall, but we’d still loved to have seen an HD screen.
Inside, Qualcomm’s 1GHz Snapdragon S4 chip holds court, paired with 512MB of memory. Nokia may have omitted wireless charging, but you still get quadband 21.1Mbps HSDPA, quadband GSM/EDGE, Bluetooth 3.0, WiFi b/g/n, and NFC. Above the display there’s a 1.3-megapixel camera with a wide-angle f/2.4 lens, while a 6.7-megapixel camera with f/1.9 Carl Zeiss optics is on the back, next to an LED flash. The latter will record 720p HD video, though not Full HD.
Software and Performance
Windows Phone 8 hasn’t deviated from what we last saw on a new Nokia, and so it’s all becoming familiar territory for both the firm and its users. The OS is undeniably approachable for first-time smartphone buyers, and while it doesn’t have widgets in the traditional sense, the Live Tiles system – where each of the resizable blocks can cycle through recent updates, media previews, upcoming events, new messages, and other information – can, with a little investment in setup time, be surprisingly rewarding. If you want to fill the homescreen with a grid of contact shortcuts, you can, or alternatively you can replicate an iOS-style layout with simple app buttons.
On top of that, Nokia throws in its own value-add, the growing suite of exclusive apps and services which the Finnish firm hopes will coax you away not only from Android or iPhone, but from other Windows Phone OEMs like HTC. Most notable are HERE Maps, HERE Drive, and Nokia Music, though there are a few tweaks along the way.
HERE Maps, for instance, now gets LiveSight and HERE Transit baked in, integrating the previously standalone City Lens and Nokia Transit technology within the one core app. LiveSight allows you to hold the Lumia 720 up and look “through” it at points of interest overlaid on top of a real-world view from the camera. It’s useful, particularly being able to zoom past buildings and see what’s behind them, if you’re in a new area, and the Nokia’s processor has no issues keeping up as you physically spin around to pan the camera.
HERE Transit, meanwhile, shifts the incredibly useful public transportation guidance into the core HERE Maps app, where it belonged all along. Nokia says it now has timetable data for more than 670 cities in 50 countries worldwide, with the ability to pin specific routes to the Windows Phone homescreen (and see, on a Live Tile, the next upcoming journey time).
What you don’t get is HERE Drive+, with global offline navigation. Instead, those in the UK will get UK and Ireland maps with offline support, but have to pay extra if they want navigation data for elsewhere in the world.
Nokia Music, meanwhile, continues to offer a compelling alternative for those shy of Spotify’s monthly subscription fee. Sign-up free, it offers 100 Mix Radio playlists that Nokia updates weekly, picking from a catalog of 22m tracks, the ability to create your own custom playlists triggered from an original “seed” track, and support for a limited number of offline playlists. The Nokia Music+ subscription service – an in-app upgrade – unlocks unlimited offline playback, as well as higher-quality audio on WiFi connections, and unlimited track-skips.
Last year we criticized Nokia’s Lumia 610 for coming to market with 256MB of RAM when the latest apps were calling for double that. The Lumia 720 makes a similar mistake – less serious initially, but likely to be no less frustrating over the course of a two-year agreement – with its 512MB looking short-sighted when apps demanding at least 1GB are starting to arrive in the Windows Phone Store.
Camera
Nokia’s 6.7-megapixel camera for the Lumia 720 uses a custom sensor and the company’s favorite Carl Zeiss optics, though falls short of PureView branding. Nonetheless, it’s a capable shooter, particularly in the sort of low-light settings we’ve praised PureView devices for previously.
So, you don’t get optical image stabilization, but you do get a camera that doesn’t lose its nerve when it comes to scenes with mixed bright and dark areas. There, the Lumia 720 leans toward maintaining detail in the low-light patches – though that can leave brighter scenes over-exposed – with results that belie the mid-range positioning of the phone. The LED flash is satisfactory, but we found we could often leave it switched off and rely on the camera’s inherent light-grabbing skills.
On the flip side, both photos and video (recorded at 720p maximum on both front and back cameras) have a tendency to introduce glare and lens-flare when you’re in brighter environments. Otherwise, video from the Lumia 720 looks solid, and the continuous auto-focus does a reasonable job at keeping your subject clear.
Our interest in front-facing cameras usually begins and ends with the odd Skype video call, but Nokia has made a specific play for those particularly keen to take self-portraits. As well as being equipped with a wide-angle lens, to fit more people in-shot, the Lumia 720 supports the new, wretchedly-named Glam Me app, which automatically enhances your selfies. Brightness, skin smoothness, blemishes and more are all ironed out, tweaked, and generally finessed; alternatively, you can apply one of several filters, with Instagram-like textures and color tones.
Phone and Battery Life
Nokia’s legacy for decent call quality continues with the Lumia 720, though the relevance of voice calls alone is perhaps questionable these days. Instead, we can’t help but feel that omitting LTE support was a missed opportunity.
The Lumia 720′s battery may be non-removable, but at 2,000 mAh it’s oversized for a 4.3-inch phone. That pays obvious dividends for runtimes: Nokia quotes up to 13.4hrs of talk time or up to 520hrs of standby (both on 3G), or alternatively 79hrs of music playback (locally-stored, not streaming).
In practice, with regular use – push email turned on, social networking use including Facebook and Twitter, some photography, music streaming, and HERE Maps – we easily made it through two days without having to reach for the microUSB charger. That’s almost enough for us to forgive the fact that wireless charging (or the kit needed to use it) isn’t bundled.
Wrap-Up
In some ways, the Lumia 720 is everything we’ve asked for from Nokia. It’s slickly designed and has superlative battery life, the camera out-performs rivals in the same price bracket, and the screen – though lower resolution than we like – is a nice compromise of size, outdoor usability, and general clarity.
Letting the show down are the absence of LTE and the potentially limiting 512MB of RAM. You could well say that the Lumia 720′s target audience won’t miss 4G, but there’s a growing cadre of people wanting higher-end features without a massive display, and they already know they want LTE. As 4G spreads, more and more people are going to expect it to on their phone. As for the RAM, that’s a more obvious drawback: games like Temple Run are quietly omitted from the Store, since they demand twice the memory the Nokia has.
It’s a frustrating flaw in what could’ve been a fantastic device, though the strengths in camera and battery life still make it a solid choice in the midrange.
Nokia reported its Q1 2013 financial results this morning, and while they’re slowly digging themselves out of a deep hole, they’re coming back around, and it seems they’re appetite for competition is growing, as it’s reported that the Finnish company is working on a phablet-style smartphone to be released later this year in order to take on Samsung’s Galaxy Note series.
According to the Financial Times, “those with knowledge of the company’s plans” say that Nokia is working on a handful of new devices for 2013, one of which is a larger phablet-style handset that’ll sport at least a 5-inch display, and will be added to Nokia’s Lumia lineup sometime this year to rival the Galaxy Note and Galaxy Note II.
This wouldn’t be too surprising, as it’s already known that Microsoft will be adding support for larger displays and 1080p resolutions to Windows Phone 8 at some point this year, and since Nokia’s a close partner with Microsoft, the company could be the first out of the gate with a phablet-style Windows Phone 8 device.
This will mark Nokia’s first move into the larger-display smartphone market, where it will be playing catch-up with the other handset manufacturers who have been making devices with larger screens for quite some time now. Will Nokia be able to make a splash with a 5-inch-or-larger Windows Phone 8 device?
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It was just the other day that many customers online have realized that handsets such as the Nokia Lumia 810 and the HTC 8X are no longer available via T-Mobile’s website, leaving many to speculate about the fate of either device. Thanks to the folks at TmoNews, they have managed to get their hands on what looks like a leaked document from the carrier, indicating that the Nokia Lumia 810 will be reaching an end of life status in May. However considering that the handset was removed from T-Mobile’s site in April, they are speculating that either the handset was removed early, or the carrier has run out of inventory and they have no plans of restocking, especially since we are only a couple of weeks away from May, the handset’s supposed EOL status.
We’ve been hearing about the 
