Nokia Lumia 920 Windows Phone 8 Announcement
- by Tim Murphy
Today Nokia and Microsoft had an event to officially introduce the Lumia 920. Below is a rundown of some of the things I found interesting. As a person who likes photography there was a lot to drool over. The main feature that caught my attention was PureView with its optical stabilization. This alone should improve the majority of you pictures. Add to that the SmartShoot Object remover that uses multiple images to remove unwanted people or objects that move through your picture and you never have to accept reality again. For the most part the lenses concept introduced in Windows Phone 8 just makes the usability of leveraging camera better. Of course that is Microsoft’s selling point. One lens that caught my attention was the Bing lens. I have to say it is about time that we can take pictures and use them to search for answers using Bing. There were a couple of features shown that involved augmented reality. One was similar to the yapf application that is already in the market which overlays restaurants and other destination over live camera views. The other was using the navigation directions with a live view. Then you get down to some of the physical features of the Lumia 920. The one that got the most stage time is that it has a great 2000mah battery which can be charged wirelessly. They also pointed out the improved glare reduction of the 4.5 in. curved glass screen. This hardware improvement is improved further with software that detects glare conditions and adjusts the display attributes to enhance viewing ease. Adding to the wireless cool factor of the Lumia 920 is the general NFC capabilities. This was demonstrated with NFC docking stations as well as JBL speakers and headphones. There was one more hardware feature that I applauded. The super sensitive touch screen did away with one of my pet peeves with capacitive touch screens. You will never have to remove you gloves to operate your phone again. The mittens that they did the demo with looked more like boxing gloves. I was disappointed with Joe Belfiore said that they were only going to show a couple of new features of the Windows Phone 8 and would hear more at future events. One of the things he did show is the ability to customize which buttons you preferred as defaults in IE10. For example you could have the folders button where the refresh button normally is. He also showed that at long last you can natively take screenshots on your phone. Hopefully he will be back quickly to give us the rest of the features. The most disappointing part of the event was that we never found out when they would be released or how much they would cost. Let’s hope this comes soon. Even with these couple of items still left on my wish list I can’t wait to get my hands on a Lumia 920. del.icio.us Tags: Windows Phone,Windows Phone 8,Nokia,Lumia,Lumia 920,Microsoft
