Windows Phone 8 is the in thing now. Currently, Nokia, Samsung and HTC are the only ones doing mass Windows Phone 8 smartphones. There’s Huawei, but they have only done one so far so we will not include them in that list for now.
Story Kidogo about the Design (and how it looks at first glance) – The build is something called a candy-bar. It even looks tasty, like something you could eat. It looks nice. Funny thing though, at first you cannot find out how you open it. But you do get the hang of it and then it becomes easy. You know how men never read manuals? This one you will have to read. I had to read it too so don not feel so bad. Was worth it too. Be sure that if you do not find out how to open this, you will break the darn thing. The plastic back cover of the Lumia 820 which is nicely rounded along the corners. I had the black version and I kept getting a feeling that buying a new back cover could make this phone feel totally brand new when you need to sell it. It is worth considering in this day and age of ‘new smartphones every day’ Thank God the battery is removable. SIM goes behind Battery. It weighs 160 grams. You will not struggle to get one thumb across the screen so , is around 9.9 mm thick and 68.5 mm wide. This means you get a decent grip while handling or operating it.
Power, Volume Up and Down and Camera Buttons are on the right side. A 3.5-mm jack is on top. The Bottom has the micro USB port and a mono speaker. This phone has a 8MP camera complete with a nicely done dual-LED flash. LED flashes are in because they consume less power. Its 4.3 inch is hard to miss. It is glossy too. What really jazzed me about this phone is the Qi wireless charging that works by induction. You place the phone on a fat-boy charger if you get the wireless charging cover and you don’t have to plug it in. This will definitely wow your pals. The wireless cover doesn’t come cheap though. Fortunately for Kenyan customers, Nokia made sure this was included in the box if you bought it from Safaricom (Airtel units also apply I think. At least according to Bruce Howe on the day of the Kenyan launch in February 2013).
Some Tu-Features – The Processor is a Dual-Core Snapdragon which is 2 cores working together (1.5 GHz) and these work hand in hand with Graphics Adreno 225 processor to give high quality images. The standard is 1 GB for RAM. OS – Windows Phone 8. Internal storage – 8GB but the OS takes up about 2 so you have 5-6 GB left to play with. It is enough for 1000 MP3 jams that average 5 MB each (I wouldn’t recommend filling it up entirely though because some free space is good for systems). Storage is expandable up to 64 GB.
Those are the features. Enough of that. When you first hold the phone it is a bit light. As compared to the Lumia 920 anyway. Not light enough to not-notice when you’re pick pocketed but light enough to not make you feel like you’re carrying a rock. Something that you will like about how the OS is done is the online backup. You can store everything online. Your phone call records, your list of apps, your photos which you can decide to sync to to SkyDrive either in high quality or a lower quality version as well as videos.
The people card is also cool. It allows you to edit contacts to link them to Facebook and then your Gmail so all your stuff is in the cloud. I liked this, It took me about 7 minutes to replicate my Lumia 820 content on a Lumia 620. And I had everything – Text messages, Previous Phone call records, pics, videos and Apps list. The Apps didn’t download automatically though. Must be because they needed to optimize for the new hardware though which is not a big issue considering they all began re-downloading as soon as I was connected to Wi-Fi again.
I have always told Nokia that if they agave me some units of these device, I would sell them like hot water bottles in Alaska. I would have sold about 9 Nokia Lumia 820’s by now. I took my friend Suzie to buy one just 2 weeks ago from Jamiat Mall. She loves it so far.
RRP is 45,000 KES but when I visited Safaricom Westgate they didn’t have any. Could they have run out? Possibly. All I know is, I wouldn’t be surprised if they had. This is going to be a hugely popular phone for anyone even the Android fanatics.
Happy WP8ing Fam. And if you’re still wondering, then Yes! I would definitely buy this phone.
