Nokia: The Nokia Lumia 920 sports a 4.5-inch 1280×768, that’s a 15:9 aspect ratio, IPS LCD. From the very begin­ning I did not think a PenTile OLED dis­play and the typography-heavy Microsoft Windows Phone OS were a good com­bi­na­tion. Oddly enough the Lumia 820 still uses a 4.3-inch 800×480 OLED, which I believe is PenTile. At least now the top-of-the-line Lumia run­ning WP8 will look absolutely fan­tas­tic with a proper retina capa­ble 331.7-ppi RGB LCD.

Why does Nokia and so many other hard­ware brands think sub-branding every pos­si­ble com­po­nent adds value? Let’s start with what Nokia calls its 4.5-inch WXGA IPS LCD: PureMotion HD+. Do you know why the + in HD+ is there? Because Nokia’s LCD is spe­cial: It has 48 more ver­ti­cal pix­els than a nor­mal HD does with just 1280×720 pix­els. The whole PureMotion HD+ sub-brand is idi­otic. It’s doesn’t sport a 16:9 aspect ratio so the LCD wasn’t clearly sourced for HD video stuff. Yet Nokia wants to slant the display’s advan­tage toward video with ‘Motion’ in the dis­play sub-brand.

Then there’s PureView; this one with a non-PureView-like 8.7 megapix­els. The f2.0 Carl Zeiss glass is very nice, but what is PureView sup­pose to mean now? A set of tech­nolo­gies Nokia uses to enhance the cam­era in its smart­phones, like opti­cal image sta­bi­liza­tion. This is a big mis­take on Nokia’s part because PureView used to mean some­thing quite spe­cial.

Optical image sta­bi­liza­tion. Let’s talk about that a lit­tle. Nokia wanted every­one to know how amaz­ing its opti­cal image sta­bi­liza­tion is and made an ad for it. Turns out it was faked. Amateurs. Still, opti­cal image sta­bi­liza­tion on a smart­phone is impres­sive. Let’s hope other brands equip OIS into their smartphones.

All in all the Nokia Lumia 920 is a well-designed smart­phone with a lot of hard­ware going for it. Unfortunately Nokia’s hard­ware and Microsoft’s OS aren’t aging well for me: The new Lumia 920 run­ning the new WP8 OS is start­ing to look old already.

Update 2012.09.06: Nokia faked the still pho­tos too.

Update 2012.11.02: Dieter Bohn, The Verge:

Marketing aside, this screen is gor­geous. It’s a 4.5-inch IPS LCD dis­play with a res­o­lu­tion of 1280 x 768, offer­ing a slightly higher pixel den­sity than the iPhone 5′s Retina Display. Text is crisp and though the pix­els don’t appear to sit as close to the sur­face as on the iPhone 5, the dif­fer­ence is minor. Really, the only knock I can deliver against it is that it does dim a bit when you’re look­ing at it at sharp angles. Given that the ClearBlack tech­nol­ogy involved polar­iz­ing the glass, it’s not a huge sur­prise nor should it cause prob­lems for users.

I’ll take cir­cu­lar polar­iz­ers that min­i­mize refraction/reflection along with the sharp angle dim­ming any day. One other area that I obsess about on a smart­phone is the camera.

There are two major cat­e­gories in which the Lumia 920 excels: low-light per­for­mance and image sta­bi­liza­tion. Both rely on what Nokia calls “float­ing lens tech­nol­ogy.” In a first for the mobile world, the entire opti­cal assem­bly inside the 920 is sus­pended on tiny springs, which absorb and dampen the move­ments of your hand as you shoot. By reduc­ing cam­era shake in this fash­ion, Nokia can afford to keep the shut­ter open for longer, absorb more light, and deliver much brighter pictures.

Nokia and Zeiss attempted to accom­plished some­thing extra­or­di­nary; it suc­ceeded for the most part. OIS on a smart­phone is quite excit­ing, but accord­ing to Bohn you can hear the springs doing their float­ing thing; for the next revi­sion I would rec­om­mend a float­ing lens tech­nol­ogy that is silent. (Lose the PureView sub-brand; by slap­ping the name on the Lumia 920, Nokia has mud­died the PureView brand, which to me meant a 41 megapixel pixel-fusing dig­i­tal zoom imag­ing tech­nol­ogy.)

Nokia is push­ing the bound­aries of what can be done with the cam­era and dis­play in its smart­phones. Nokia did good with the dis­play: The cir­cu­lar polar­izer should be copied by every other smart­phone man­u­fac­turer. But the over­all results are less than per­fect. The Nokia Lumia 920 is big, thick, and heavy; the thick­ness is due to OIS. Would a smaller, thin­ner, and lighter Lumia 920 with a less capa­ble cam­era have been bet­ter? Maybe. Instead of bleed­ing edge tech­nolo­gies inte­grated into a body only a few might love, Nokia needs to focus on advanced tech­nolo­gies that can be inte­grated into a neat pack­age that would be loved by many.