Mobile
Nokia Introduces Nokia Lumia 925
Smartphone users with an eye for build quality and materials now have a new device to choose: the Nokia Lumia 925.
Announced this morning by Nokia’s head of smart devices, Jo Harlow, the Nokia Lumia 925 will feature a 4.5 inch Clear Black AMOLED display, an 8.7 megapixel front-facing camera and a 1.3 megapixel rear-facing camera. All of this will be powered by a 1.5 Ghz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor and 1GB of RAM.
While those specs aren’t vast improvements over the recently announced Nokia Lumia 928 and last fall’s Nokia Lumia 920, Nokia seems to be hoping that they can attract even more users to its stable of smartphones by experimenting with their design language.
All of this for what the company says will be “around” 469 euros unsubsidized, or $609 on wireless carriers, including Vodafone in Europe and T-Mobile in the United States.
In addition to having an all metal frame and polycarbonate back, the Nokia Lumia 925 marks another significant evolution in Nokia’s Windows Phone design language. Until now, every Lumia device featured plastics entirely though the quality ranged between cheaper plastics in the company’s low-end devices and full on polycarbonate chassis on the high end devices. While most users believed that the polycarbonate casing felt great to the touch and looked gorgeous, the company’s flagship phones until now have commonly been described as blocky or thick.
By switching to aluminum the company has been able to create a device with many of the same features as the Lumia 920’s in a case that’s only 8.5 mm thick. That stands in stark contrast to the 10.7 mm thickness of the Lumia 920.
Read: Review – Nokia Lumia 920
The company wasn’t able to do so without having to sacrifice some features. Perhaps because the company set its sights on creating a thinner device, and certainly because of the device’s aluminum enclosure, users will have to resort to using add-on covers to wirelessly charge their devices.
Instead of releasing the device in its usual band of yellow, red, cyan and white, Nokia will instead be sticking to gray and black. Nokia will focus on providing bold color options only on those aforementioned wireless charging covers.
The company also, detailed the new Nokia Smart Cam application that yesterday’s teaser featured. With the application users will be able to replace Windows Phone’s native camera application and choose between different modes that enhance the user’s photographs. These modes include the ability to alter faces and remove people from pictures taken by the application. Nokia Smart Cam is altogether different from what Samsung offers its user in the Samsung Galaxy S4 currently.
Users of other Nokia Lumia devices will be able to get Nokia Smart Cam via an Amber firmware update at some point in the future. While Nokia didn’t go into any more detail about Amber, that the company is giving it a name at all means it must be big and could possibly be the new name for the GDR2 update that’s rumored to be coming soon.
Read: 808 PureView – Best Camera Phone Yet
Speaking of cameras, the Lumia 925, much to the chagrin of those who had hoped for a successor to the Nokia 808 PureView, seems to keep the same exact camera sensors that are available in the Lumia 920 and 928. These include those device’s 8.7 megapixel sensor with PureView technology and optical image stabilization.
Jo, Harlow did note that the company had done some more work around image processing during today’s press event, but didn’t discuss specifics.
Nokia expects to begin making final announcements on availability this June, however it was careful to note that the device would be coming to T-Mobile in the United States. Britain’s Vodafone will be the only carrier to get a 32GB version of the device, and China will be getting the phone by way of China Mobile.
According to a press release recently made available, the device will arrive in European markets and China first, with the United States and other countries to follow soon after.