News - Nokia Lumia 820 and 920 revealed - not a lot of surprises

[Unique]

All the negative stuff here about lack of memory card slot and removable battery is pathetic.

You don't need more than 32GB on a phone. I have 32GB on my tablet and took it for a two week holiday packed with films and music and had plenty of space for downloading photos off my camera.

If you need more than 32GB for music then you clearly need to get more organised with your data.

Removable battery is not an issue either. What percentage of people with smart phones actually carrier a second battery in case their primary battery goes flat..., I bet less than 1%, with micro usb charging port you've plenty of options to charge the battery on the go.


The biggest flaw with Nokia was not releasing price or date on this....

if you don't need more than 32gb on a phone, why does the lower model have an SD card?


the issue is putting an SD card on the cheap model, but not the high end one. if there was no SD card on either, that's one thing. but why move from iphone to that, as it doesn't give one of the main features that you can't get on an iphone

battery isn't something that bothers me, and i do fine without an SD card and have less then 32gb at the moment, but i could easily fill the space if i had it, and that's because i'm organised with my data, not the opposite

[Tpyo]

I'm guessing with Win8 they are arguing it can be uploaded to the cloud storage/SKydrive thingummy, though that would need to be imited to wifi as the only practical option if you have any kind of bandwidth limit on your contract.

[kingpotnoodle]

Try looking at the spec for the Galaxy S3, where MicroSD capacity alone goes up to 64GB. The 920 can record in video 1080p @ 30fps which will use a lot of space. This is before any other data stored is taken into account.

My Sensation can also record 1080p/30 and currently claims around 5hours recording time left with 20GB free on it's 32GB card.

How many people record more than 5hours on a phone? Pretty sure the battery wouldn't last that long anyway.

If you're that serious about recording things I'd wager you would probably want a proper camcorder or better or you'd have a studio around or laptop with you to offload your output.

Also dragging more than 32GB on/off a Flash device with poor read/write speeds is going to be super painful - most phones manage less than even their USB2 interfaces can support. Even say 15MB/s is quite fast for a phone, and thats 35-40 mins worth of transfer to fill 32GB.

[miniyazz]

All the negative stuff here about lack of memory card slot and removable battery is pathetic.

You don't need more than 32GB on a phone. I have 32GB on my tablet and took it for a two week holiday packed with films and music and had plenty of space for downloading photos off my camera.

If you need more than 32GB for music then you clearly need to get more organised with your data.

Removable battery is not an issue either. What percentage of people with smart phones actually carrier a second battery in case their primary battery goes flat..., I bet less than 1%, with micro usb charging port you've plenty of options to charge the battery on the go.


The biggest flaw with Nokia was not releasing price or date on this....

Erm... no.

Just because you're too short-sighted to see a need for a removable SD card or battery is no reason to prevent the rest of the world from taking advantage of it.

A full-featured film in 720p encoded by h.264 may take around 4GB of space by itself. There are dozens of situations in which you might want to have more than 32GB of storage available.. as memory becomes cheaper, along come more things to use it.

As for removable batteries, I presume you prefer to buy a new phone then when (not if) your original battery starts to die? Some people do, that's OK. What's not OK is arguing that everyone should buy a new phone when a £15 battery from eBay would have cured the problem.

[heXuser]

I like it...

[crossy]

All the negative stuff here about lack of memory card slot and removable battery is pathetic. You don't need more than 32GB on a phone.

Time to reiterate some of the discussion on HOX v's S3 on xda:
1. Removable battery (for some) is a necessity since it gives assurance that in the event of a total OS foobar you've got an easily accessible "kill switch". Note: waiting until the battery flattens is NOT a substitute!
2. Removable battery removes the need to return an entire phone should the battery fail. According to one of the statistics quoted elsewhere, there's still around about 1-2% batteries that are defective on shipment. In addition if you're planning to hold onto your phone longer than 24 months, then being able to replace the now worn-out battery with a new one is a major plus;
3. Removable battery allows the replacement of stock item with a high capacity or different capability. E.g. S3's design allows future addition of inductive charging or "camel back" for physically larger battery, the equivalent HTC One X's unibody design doesn't;
4. Removable memory isn't that useful in itself, but it does allow a manufacturer to make a single SKU if desired;
5. User can populate the removable memory using a card reader rather than having to use the phone in mass storage mode. This MAY allow faster transfers;
6. uSDHC and uSDXC cards are widely available and relatively cheap - so "upgrades" are inexpensive and easily achieved;
7. With a large capacity card, you don't have to think about what needs to be stored on it, instead you can just put anything you're likely to want. The usual rejoinder is is that Google Drive, iCloud, Skydrive, etc are alternatives - however, these need either an AYCE data plan (with good connectivity) or WiFi;
8. If rooting and trying other ROM's, that removable card gives the ability to store a copy of the OS (known good) away from the phone.

You're undoubtedly correct in that better data management means you can easily use a 32GB or even 16GB fixed memory, but as Eileen Rivera on TWIT's All About Android has pointed out in the past, some of us pack rats aren't that well organised.

When I got my current phone (S3 16GB model) I made sure to buy a 64GB uSDXC card. And now I have a viable replacement for my hard disk based iPod (80GB model), being able to store my entire music library, whilst still having ample space for a couple of videos, some large apps and - more importantly at the moment, a good technical library of PDF's. It's nice to have manuals easily to hand when you're in the depths of a server room! And no, I'm not planning to replace my card any time soon - I merely got it so I could have a large capacity phone - no need to wait around for a 64GB S3 to appear.

So while you can't see the desirability of either removable battery and/or removable storage, others definitely can.

[AGTDenton]

To me the specs say, if you want the best camera go with 920.
But if you want a good camera and all round flexibility go wuith the 820. Battery replaceable, more space, same processor.

A couple of the specs seem to be going backwards:
My current Nokia is 12MP - so you can only hope the lens & focus technology is of better quality otherwise why bother upgrading, especially if the camera is one of the main reasons you bought the phone.
My current nokia supports 48MB space, handy for taking lots of 720p videos and not having to delete them all the time. Now its 1080p so you have to use more space for higher quality but have less space overall to use.

[Brewster0101]

So while you can't see the desirability of either removable battery and/or removable storage, others definitely can.

I won't quote your whole post - it was a tad long....

But Nokia is making these phones for the mass market, not users/readers of people on the XDA pages who want to flaff around with rooting or tinkering with phones or all those other little specific requirements.

Its a portable phone, portable camera, portable music player, portable web broswer, portable games machine, portable video player...... From Nokia's view it ticks all the boxes for 99% of the market, the market they are gunning for.

99% of people don't need more memory, or removable battery.

[miniyazz]

I hear 99% of statistics are made up on the spot.

[Brewster0101]

I hear99% of statistics are made up on the spot.

Even more so to have a good argument

[MattEvansC3]

I'm waiting for the pricing to be announced because I'm not being tied into a contract again. The memory won't be an issue for me too much as my current WP7 auto syncs with my PC wirelessly so every day I can just delete the videos and photos from phone except for the ones I like to have on me.

The size is an issue though, it looks to be about the same dimensions (if not bigger) than a Galaxy S3 and thats too big for me.

[george1979]

You don't have to wait for the battery to run out on the Lumias. Just hold down the volume down and lock button for 5 seconds or so and the phone reboots. Obviously if the hardware buttons don't respond then there is a problem but I think in the majority of cases people just don't know they can reboot it.

Honestly a quick search on Google would tell people this. Do people honestly think companies like Microsoft/Nokia, with everything they have riding on this, would release a phone with an irremovable battery without a means of rebooting it? Makes no sense.

[crossy]

I won't quote your whole post - it was a tad long.... But Nokia is making these phones for the mass market, not users/readers of people on the XDA pages who want to flaff around with rooting or tinkering with phones or all those other little specific requirements.

Its a portable phone, portable camera, portable music player, portable web broswer, portable games machine, portable video player...... From Nokia's view it ticks all the boxes for 99% of the market, the market they are gunning for. 99% of people don't need more memory, or removable battery.

No, still think you're wrong - only my last point is for technocrats, and possibly #5/#4. The rest is perfectly applicable to Joe/Jane Public.

One final point, the cheaper 820 - which I would assume is the one that Nokia feel they'll sell the most of - appears to have memory card and removable battery. In which case, with the greatest respect of course, I would suggest that Nokia are disagreeing with you.

So for me personally the 920 is a waste of money and if I'm going for a Lumia it'll be the 820 that gets my money.

[directhex]

Try looking at the spec for the Galaxy S3, where MicroSD capacity alone goes up to 64GB.

There are three types of SD card - SDSC, which does sizes from 1 meg to 2 gig (4 gig technically possible but rarely supported); SDHC, which does sizes from 4 gig to 32 gig; and SDXC, which does sizes from 32 gig to 1 terabyte.

The Galaxy S3 supports SDSC and SDHC, in Micro form factor.

If it just happens to work with SDXC cards reformatted to use the same filesystem as SDHC (FAT32), then that's great - but it's out-of-spec, and essentially relies on luck.

No device can advertise support for memory cards greater than 32 gig unless it advertises support for SDXC. Case in point, from the Galaxy S3 manual:

Your device accepts microSD(TM) or microSDHC(TM) memory cards with maximum capacities of 32 GB (depending on the memory card manufacturer and type).

[Brewster0101]

One final point, the cheaper 820 - which I would assume is the one that Nokia feel they'll sell the most of - appears to have memory card and removable battery. In which case, with the greatest respect of course, I would suggest that Nokia are disagreeing with you.

Can't Argue with that

[crossy]

The Galaxy S3 supports SDSC and SDHC, in Micro form factor.

If it just happens to work with SDXC cards reformatted to use the same filesystem as SDHC (FAT32), then that's great - but it's out-of-spec, and essentially relies on luck.

Slight correction here. The S3 officially supports up to uSDHC but - as you say - SDXC works fine. However, your assertion that an SDXC card needs to be formatted to FAT32 on the S3 is incorrect - I'm using the LH1 baseband and LG8 (official) ROM and the 64GB Sandisk uSDXC card that's in there was formatted as exFAT by Sandisk and I've seen no reason to change that. Just double checked with ASI and it's telling me that /mnt/extSdCard is type "exfat".

Although in triple checking it I did find a reference that exFAT support "disappeared" for the LF1 revision - but that stupidity seems to have been limited to folks running ROMs from Orange, (certainly I had no problems with that ROM revision with my SIM-free S3).