(Lumia 720 Review Continued...)
I purchased my Lumia 720 from a
reputable Ebay seller out of Hong Kong. Shipping was
extremely prompt, and I received my phone within 2 days. Wow! The packaging was generic and very "Nokia". Nothing special, but not bad. Everything about the phone -- including the charger -- was intended for use in Hong Kong,
which meant that performing a Hard Reset was definitely the best option for me to start with.
Another interesting tidbit is what happened when I reset the phone with my SIM card installed (AT&T US) and immediately signed in with my Microsoft Account. As a background, I've been resetting my phones a
lot lately, especially as I've tried to nail down some issues with the Lumia 920. In every case, my "new phone" would be a secondary phone, and thus would have no SIM card when first reset. Since Microsoft doesn't give you an option to connect to wifi before you login (seriously....fix this, Microsoft), you have to either 1) have a SIM card installed with a data plan, or 2) choose to "sign-in later" after the reset is complete. Signing-in later totally changes the experience. In this instance, though, I had my SIM card installed (meaning I had AT&T data available), so I chose to sign in with my Microsoft Account immediately. Much to my surprise, I was presented with a "Restore from Backup" option that showed previously saved phone states that I could opt to restore from. I chose my most recent, and let the process complete. The Lumia 720 already configured my
work and
personal email accounts, as well as Facebook. I was simply prompted to provide the passwords. After reaching the home screen, the phone began to automatically download my apps to the phone. AMAZING! It also made me feel like an ***** for never having done this before. Oh well
The restore isn't perfect, of course -- things like IE favorites, Home Screen layout, and App configurations are
not restored (and they should be, in my opinion) -- but it's really a great feature otherwise. Cool stuff.
CAMERA (updated)
After getting my phone configured, I wanted to snap some photos and see how the camera performed in various situations. More importantly, how does the Lumia 720 camera compare to the Lumia 920 or 820? In my opinion, it fares very well. The low-light capability seems to add a bit more "noise" than the 920, but also allows for more light. I tend to use the "touch screen to focus" option for taking photos, so that was my method of choice. For the most part, the camera focused and snapped quickly -- and nearly as fast as the 920 -- but seems to have trouble on the first photo I take. Also, having the phone save Photos to the SD Card appeared to add some lag to the process. I should verify this further, but for now I'm using the SD card for my Music and Videos, while keeping my Photos on the Internal Storage. It also seemed like I needed to restart the phone after changing this.
You can see my photo results here:
http://sdrv.ms/11by8bh
As an update to this section, I can indeed verify that with a microSD card installed, the Lumia 720 has
extra lag on the first photo. In other words, the phone has been idle/off for awhile, you launch the camera, tap to focus, take a picture, and that very first shot takes about an extra 2 - 3 seconds to acquire proper focus. The proceeding shots are fast. This behavior did NOT occur when I removed the microSD card, restarted, and performed the same test. Strangely enough, in both case I have my photos saving to the Phone Storage and *not* the SD card, but somehow the SD card is involved in the process when installed. I'm guessing that this is a Nokia firmware fix issue.
EARPIECE and
SPEAKER
I suppose it's not necessarily true for everyone, but phones still need to be good "phones". I've been surprised to find handsets that require the volume to be set at 10 (out of 10) just to sound "ok" and provide the adequate amount of output for a conversation in a noisy-ish place. Other phones have external speakers that are truly atrocious and useful for nearly nothing. I'm happy to say that the Lumia 720 is a
good performer in both respects. The earpiece, while sounding slightly tinny at times, has been plenty loud for me. The volume on 8/10 has been more than enough for outside conversations, and I'll occasionally bump down to 7/10 indoors (or depending upon how loud the person is).
The speaker -- located on the lower back of the phone, rather than the bottom (like the 920) -- isn't amazing, by any means, but gets loud enough for me without sounding like you're ruining the speaker at louder volumes. I'm not an avid speakerphone user, so I'll let others comment on this. It's certainly good enough for me, and it hasn't been an annoyance at all.
PHYSICAL BUTTONS
I hadn't really though about it a whole lot, but the feel of the "physical buttons" on a phone
really affects your overall experience. First of all, I (personally) love the placement that Nokia has chosen for the Volume, Power, and Camera. Whereas the older Lumia 900 buttons felt slightly cheaper and wiggly, the Lumia 920 seemed to remedy that -- and they nearly felt perfect. Having then tested both the Lumia 620 (buttons are OK) and the Lumia 820 (buttons aren't great), I was concerned that the 720 was going to lean in those directions. I'm happy to report that the physical buttons on the Lumia 720 are nearly
perfect in my book. The buttons have a great tactile feel, they don't rattle (that I've heard), and the camera has a great two-stage function -- though I don't snap photos that way very often. The placement is also spot-on in my book, and
very preferable to the placement on a phone like the HTC 8X (honestly, HTC, stop putting the power button up top!). If there is any complaint at all, it's that the buttons are ever so slightly too recessed -- but just barely.
PERFORMANCE
This is an area where Windows Phone (even back to the initial WP7 release) has always been able to shine brightly. For the most part, this is still true with the Lumia 720...but with a caveat. Yes, the 720 is clocked slower than the flagship phones --
1.0ghz dual-core vs 1.5ghz dual-core -- but it really shouldn't make a difference. In day to day use, however, these lower-clocked phones tend to show the "Loading" screen much more frequently than what seems to be necessary. Once you're in an application, I can't say that I've truly noticed any difference -- whether writing an email, editing a photo, or making a phone call -- but getting into the applications takes a second longer, and you do start to get bothered after awhile.
In my opinion, this is more of an OS tweak than a limitation of the phone itself. Even if the speed was never changed, I'd love it if the "loading" screen itself went away, since it just seems to be a beacon crying out "I'm taking too long to open!" and draws attention unnecessarily. I've even seen the "loading" screen when launching the built-in Calculator app! Sheesh...it doesn't get any more lightweight than that.
All in all, performance within Apps and Games has been fine. Asphalt7 plays great, as do less-intensive games such as Angry Birds or AlphaJax. By nature of the slower CPU, it's getting
in to applications that has been slowed down. I'm hoping that future OS tweaks or firmware updates can help speed this up just a tad.
BATTERY LIFE
Perhaps due to the aforementioned CPU speed reduction, but the battery life on my Lumia 720 has been nothing short of phenomenal.
(Worth noting: I leave Wi-fi and Bluetooth on 24/7, NFC off, two email accounts syncing every 30 minutes, brightness on "low")
My previous experience with the battery-draining Lumia 920 probably puts the 720 is a positive light more than it ought to, but I'm desperately trying to compare the Lumia 720 to every phone I've used over the past few years. Without a doubt, the 720 easily bests them all. That especially impressive when you consider that new phones tend to get
poked and prodded more than the daily drivers, simply because they're new, fun, and getting "tested".
A typical day for me usually looks like: unplug at 6:30AM, listen to music (sometimes streaming) for 45 minutes during my commute, 10 - 15 text messages during the day, perhaps 30 - 40 minutes of phone calls, approximately 30 minutes of Netflix (steaming over cell data), maybe 20 minutes of Scrabble-like gaming, 30 - 40 minutes of web browsing, and a few other things here and there. Over the past two weeks, I've been using my Lumia 720 even more as I've been testing things out -- to the point of being almost abusive (in my opinion). By 10PM or so, it's quite typical to still have 45% of my battery left -- and sometimes more. If that doesn't amaze you, I'm not sure what will
EXTERNAL STORAGE (updated)This was a new one for me. My previous phones -
listed earlier - did not have expandable storage, so I was always limited to whatever came stock as Onboard Memory -- usually 16GB, or 32GB (in the case of the Lumia 920). I'm not really a pack rat, so even 16GB of storage is enough for me. That said, the Lumia 720 comes with only 8GB of Onboard Storage, which is quickly used up with a handful of apps, games, pictures, and (especially) video. The solution, of course, is grabbing a microSD card for up to 64GB of additional space. In the WP7 world, this meant a hard reset of the phone. In the WP8 world, microSD cards can be added/removed on-the-fly, which (in theory) is very nice.
In reality, my experience has been less-than-stellar. I really just wanted a large microSD card to put all of my music on, and the rest could stay on the phone. I grabbed a Kingston 64GB card, but it didn't seem to like my phone. After a bit of research, I settled on a SanDisk 32GB Class 10 card, which appeared to be faster anyhow, and my phone was ok with it. Sadly, there is a known issue microSD cards + WP8 = duplicate songs -- sometimes as many as 4 or 5 duplicates per track! The
actual files aren't duplicated, of course, but they appear to be duped on the phone, which means it will try to play them that many times. Pretty frustrating. I was finally able to find a "solution" (
posted here), but it really seems to be an issue with WP8 itself. Hopefully a fix is on the way.
Once the songs were sorted out, I was able to truly test the performance of the external storage. In my experience,
it's not so good. Opening the Xbox Music is snappy enough, but once you click on an Artist or Album, you have to wait 2 or 3 seconds for the UI to respond. It's ridiculous. When using the Onboard Storage, that same operation is instantaneous. When using the "Cloud Sync" option, that same operation is also instantaneous. When using the SD storage, however, it appears to chunk and read slowly
every single time. This is an OS issue, in my opinion, and Microsoft needs scan and catalog the SD card upon insertion. Strangely enough,
playing music has been flawless, and skipping from track to track has been instantaneous.
I really haven't spent much time using the SD card for photos and video, so I can't comment on that. That said, I would love to hear if others have had more or less success with various types of microSD cards.
An update on the SD card storage issues.
My full write-up on this is posted here, but I've so far been able to use the same microSD card *and* have the Artists and Albums
both opening/playing very fast. There are a number of steps to test this for yourself, so please check out my post.
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