Nokia hasn’t been coy with the announcement of its latest flagship handset. We’ve known about the Lumia 928 for some time now, but over the weekend we finally got a look at the future of Nokia’s Windows Phone 8 push. There’s good news and bad news with this one, where would you like me to start?
The Good News…
Always start with the good news. Always.
The good news here is that the Lumia 928 looks awesome. It’s the Lumia we should have always had: the one choc-full of Nokia’s Pureview camera technology.
The camera is really the headline that Nokia is pushing here. It’s an 8.7-megapixel shooter with Carl Zeiss optics and an aperture of f/2.0. The 928 packs in Nokia’s Optical Image Stabilisation gear like it did in the Lumia 920, only it’s better this time around. The 928 is branded as having Pureview technology, which was last spotted in Nokia’s crazy “41-megapixel” Pureview 808.
The PureView technology works in a couple of ways. On the Pureview 808, for example, the image sensor was enormous, the optics were fine-tuned on the device, and some Nokia maths was going on under the hood to actually get these images to an insane resolution of 7728 x 5368 pixels. That’s billboard-size.
Here’s how PureView works in the 808:
The Lumia 928 doesn’t go quite that gung-ho when it comes to the camera, but it does have Pureview branding, which hopefully means it has the same Nokia maths under the hood to help smooth out pixellated images and improve the quality of the camera while zooming. That’s what the Pureview 808 was all about.
The Lumia 928 has already shown that it can do some incredible stuff in low-light, much like the predecessor 920 model, and when it finally gets its day in the teardown lab, we might be able to see what’s going on under the hood to get us these cracking images.
The other good news comes from the Lumia 928’s screen. It’s a 4.5-inch WXGA screen with a resolution of 1280×768 and 334 ppi. The most interesting thing about the display, however, is the different modes available.
Nokia lists that the luminance of the display is measured at 300 nits. Not bad, but it has what’s known as a High Brightness Mode which boosts the brightness to 500 nits. Nokia also lists a “sunlight readability mode” in the specs, which means it’s finally thinking about how people use gadgets outdoors. That’s great news, because the Lumia 920 with its curved front glass suffered from a brightness issue in direct sunlight because of the refraction in that slight air-gap.
The new brightness tech, coupled with the flat screen glass ought to give us a brighter display, despite the fact that the 928 is 100 nits dimmer than the Lumia 920. That hopefully also means the display will draw slightly less power from the battery.
Speaking of the battery, the Lumia 928 is rocking 2000mAh of power under the hood. That’s exactly the same as the Lumia 920, so hopefully the Finnish manufacturer has done some tinkering under the hood to make it draw less juice.
Elsewhere, the Lumia 928 has a 1.5GHz dual-core processor from our friends at Qualcomm, 1GB of RAM and 32GB of internal memory. It also has 4G/LTE compatibility. Hurrah!
Now for the bad news.
The Bad News…
As you may have noticed, the Lumia 928 isn’t exactly a powerhouse.
Whereas competitors like the HTC One and the Samsung Galaxy S4 have power that can reboot the Matrix if needs be, the Lumia 928 opts for pretty much the same specifications as the last year’s flagship, which wasn’t particularly well-regarded at the time.
Comparatively, the Lumia 920 has exactly the same dual-core 1.5GHz processor, exactly the same amount of RAM and exactly the same amount of storage as the Lumia 928. Perhaps the market is demanding too much from smartphone manufacturers these days when it comes to generational increases in power, but seeing exactly the same numbers on a spec sheet when compared to last year’s model is pretty disappointing.
The other bit of bad news comes in the form of availability: the Lumia 928 has been created “exclusively for Verizon” in the US. Nokia Australia currently has “no news to share” about the local availability of the Lumia 928. No ETA, no rumours. Nothing.
That’s not to say we’ll never get the Lumia 928, but seeing as how we already have five Lumia’s on the market, it’s a fair bet that we won’t see it for a while.