Nokia Lumia 925 Unveiled

After the modest global success of the Nokia Lumia 920 last year, Nokia is soon to follow-up with the release of the next in line: the Lumia 925. Rather than a totally new device, the 925 is being called more of a ‘new take on the Lumia 920’, while also taking the 920's place as the new Nokia flagship. Nokia has addressed the criticisms of its bulky Lumia 920 physical design. The Lumia 925 is lighter and thinner, weighing in at just 139g and with a much smaller profile of 8.5mm, compared to the 185g and 10.7mm of the Lumia 920. This is the kind of difference that doesn’t sound like much on paper but believe us, when you hold two smartphones in your hand with these kind of opposing specs you can immediately tell which smartphone you’d prefer in your pocket and in your life. Unfortunately the problem of the height-and-width-to-screen ratio doesn’t seem to have been fixed. The Lumia 920 was roughly the same size as its contemporaries like the Galaxy S III, except with a noticeably smaller screen. This meant unfortunately thick bezels that detracted from the overall great look of the 920. The Lumia 925 boasts almost identical measurements in height and width, leading us to believe that this will continue to be an issue. Still, the weight and thickness of the 920 were definitely more immediate problems, so at the very least Nokia is tackling physical design flaws in order of importance. Continuing on the theme of physical design, the Lumia 925 has moved away from the polycarbonate casing that has come to represent the Lumia line. Instead, Nokia has instead gone for an aluminum frame this time around, with the polycarbonate still making an appearance on the rear of the device. It’s an interesting approach to aesthetic design that is already being congratulated as being one of the more stunning that anyone has seen in the last 12 months. Unfortunately the only colors that we’ve been shown so far are white, grey and black with Nokia not showing off, nor hinting at, any of those vibrant colors that we’ve come to really know and love. Instead Nokia seems to be going with colorful protective cases. Granted, covering a colorful phone with a case means that no one sees the vibrant liveliness underneath anyway, but it’s nice to have manufacturers going with something other than white, grey, black and occasionally metallic silver. Despite the lack of eye-catching colors, the Lumia 925 still looks great in terms of pure aesthetics and is noticeably less-bulky than its awkwardly large predecessor. Unfortunately, the Windows Phone OS is holding Nokia back a bit in terms of hard specs. The 4.5 inch AMOLED display on the 925 still boasts a 768x1280 resolution. The dual-core 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4 CPU is still ‘good enough’ on the WP8 OS, as is the 1GB of RAM, but it’s not Good Enough in terms of competitive edge and marketing. WP is a more closed ecosystem than Android, so less specs are required to do the same job. However, when Android is in its second generation of quad-core power-phones and you’re still fronting dual-cores, it’s not going to go very far towards luring in new users. Of course the 925 has 4G LTE support, wireless charging, 16GB of storage on-board storage and 7GB of Skydrive. The 2000mAh batter should do pretty well and of course Nokia’s abundance of cool accessories will all support it. The PureView 8.7MP camera has reportedly seen some improvements over the 920’s. The Lumia 920 definitely had one of the better cameras on the market when it was released, especially in terms of low-light shots. But it still had trouble with fast autofocus, light bleeding and random blurring. As such the 920 still couldn’t quite compete with the iPhone 5, but at least it was up there, leaving Nokia in a position to keep up or even move ahead of the pack. It’s good to see that camera-centric focus continuing through. This means that the PureView on the Lumia 925 could very well be an even better camera than we've yet seen from Nokia, which would be saying something. There are also some new camera modes, such as Smart Camera. Smart Camera captures ten images at once, allowing the images to be edited retroactively with Action Shot, Motion Focus and Best SShot. Hipstamatic’s new Oggle app will also be available on all Lumia devices, including the 925, allowing users to share through Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Tumblr. The Lumia 925 definitely sounds like the best Windows Phone we’ve seen yet, but other than its visual appeal and camera improvements (with the camera improvements yet to be judged), there doesn’t seem to be much over the Lumia 920. The 925 should be enough to keep WP moving along as a viable option for smartphone shoppers, but it’s probably going to need something a bit more ground-breaking if it’s going to compete with the HTC One, GS4 and the fast-approaching iPhone 5S in the global market.