The Nokia Lumia 920 ($99.99 with contract) takes its role as Windows Phone’s “flagship” seriously: It feels like it’s the size of an aircraft carrier. If you’re willing to put up with a huge chunk of smartphone in your pocket, though, you’ll get the best performance Windows Phone 8 has to offer, along with important, exclusive apps that really enhance the phone’s experience.

Whether you like big phones is a personal choice, but know that they’re a growing segment of the market. The Lumia 920 is in the same size class as the LG Optimus G, Motorola Razr Maxx HD, and the HTC Titan II, for instance. This is where my personal choices diverge from my rating and recommendation. The Lumia 920 is too big for me. But it might not be too big for you.

Physical Design
The Lumia 920 is built like a tank. Its main body is a thick block of polycarbonate with rolled edges and a 4.5-inch Gorilla Glass screen on the front. The headphone jack is at the top center of the phone; the micro USB jack is at the bottom center. There’s no memory card slot, and the battery is sealed in. The right side holds the Volume, Power, and Camera buttons. They’re all prominent and easy to press, although I kept confusing the Power and Camera buttons.

Nokia offers more color options, but on AT&T, the phone comes in red, white, blue, yellow and black. The red and yellow are both very aggressive and glossy, like an Italian sports car. The blue is bright, but less exclamatory. The black is matte, the white glossy and sleek. Of the bunch, I like the white and blue best. Too many phones are black, and the red and yellow are just bright enough to be divisive.

At 5.1 by 2.8 by 0.4 inches (HWD) and over 6.5 ounces, the Lumia 920 is the biggest, heaviest phone in its class. It’s thicker than the LG Optimus G, wider than the Motorola Razr Maxx HD, and taller than the HTC Titan II. It’s even heavier than the Samsung Galaxy Note II “phablet.” While the Lumia 920 feels solid as a rock, it also weighs your pocket down like a stone.

You get a smaller screen here than on competing Android phones of the same size (4.5 versus 4.7 inches), but the 920’s display is absolutely gorgeous. Nokia has loaded it down with meaningless brand-words like “PureMotion” and “ClearBlack,” but what we have here is a 1,280-by-768-pixel, IPS LCD panel with intensely deep blacks and super-saturated colors. It’s higher-density than the Apple iPhone 5’s screen, at 331 pixels per inch to the iPhone’s 325, and it’s very bright. 

Sit the Lumia 920 next to the 4.3-inch HTC 8X, and the 8X looks a little dim and washed out. The bigger screen also makes Windows Phone’s somewhat picky touch keyboard a lot more usable; I experienced noticeably fewer typos on the Lumia 920 than I did on the HTC 8X.

With seemingly no concerns about weight, Nokia threw a 2000mAh battery into the 920’s sealed case. I got 9 hours, 56 minutes of 3G talk time, which is very good, and just under four hours of streaming YouTube video over LTE on high screen brightness, which is average for high-end smartphones. The 8X had less talk time, but more streaming video time thanks to its smaller screen.

One of its stand-out features, the 920 features wireless charging, which Nokia talks about with great enthusiasm, but which various manufacturers and carriers have been trying to promote for years with little success. Wireless charging isn’t completely wireless, of course: A charging pad still needs to be plugged into an outlet, but you don’t need to plug anything into the actual phone itself. While Nokia hasn’t released prices for its wireless charging stand and pillow, the compatible Energizer Single-Position Inductive Charger lists for $54.99, much more than the $5 you’ll pay on the street for a micro USB charging cable.

Although the Lumia 920 doesn’t have a memory card slot, it does have 32GB of built-in storage, more than any of the competing first-round Windows Phone 8 models.

Phone Calling and Internet
I tested the Lumia 920 in a storm-ravaged New York City on a truly wobbly AT&T LTE network, so I’m writing off the dropped calls; I’ve been getting dropped calls on all of my phones this week. Voice call quality here is better than on the HTC 8X. The earpiece and speakerphone are louder, and there’s a ton of side-tone, preventing you from yelling into the phone.

The phone had no problem pairing with a Plantronics Voyager Legend  Bluetooth headset and triggering Microsoft’s voice commands from the headset. The voice command software, however, isn’t great. It dials the phone just fine, but free-form queries like “how’s the weather?” generate Web searches rather than direct answers.

AT&T’s LTE network typically offers the fastest downloads in the nation, where it’s available. Right now it covers 80 cities, well short of Verizon’s 400 LTE markets. Here in New York, I’ve gotten consistently faster results on AT&T than on Verizon. In our most recent pre-hurricane tests in New York, we saw 19.21Mbps down on AT&T as compared to only 7.67Mbps on Verizon. Performance really varies city by city, though, so make sure to check our Fastest Mobile Networks tests, which covered 30 U.S. cities.

The Lumia 920 supports an insane number of frequency bands, making it able to connect to global HSPA+ and LTE networks—that is, if AT&T has roaming agreements with those carriers. Right now there are no LTE roaming agreements in place, so international roaming will be at still-impressive HSPA+ 42 speeds.

The Lumia 920 also supports 2.4GHz and 5GHz 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0, GPS, and NFC. It works as a Wi-Fi hotspot for up to 5 devices with the appropriate data plan. Both the Lumia 920 and the HTC 8X were able to max out my 15Mbps cable connection over Wi-Fi.

Apps, Maps, and Exclusives
The Nokia Lumia 920 and HTC 8X both use the same 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm S4 Krait processor, and both show similar benchmark results. On cross-platform benchmark Antutu, they perform similarly to the top echelon of Android phones. On Web browser benchmarks, they show the characteristics of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 10: surprisingly slow Browsermark scores, fast Sunspider Javascript scores, and great Guimark HTML5 gaming scores.  In my experience, that means pages appeared to start rendering more slowly than on competing Android phones, but once pages were rendered, they scrolled smoothly and interactive elements responded quickly.

For the ins and outs of the platform, read our Windows Phone 8 review. The difference in performance between these Windows phones is more about the included apps, and here Nokia has an edge. Nokia Maps, Drive, and Transit are a very big deal. Microsoft’s Bing Maps isn’t nearly up to the quality of Google Maps on Android. It has no turn-by-turn, voice-guided navigation, no transit directions, and a limited POI database with, in my neighborhood, a lot of inaccuracies. AT&T puts Telenav on its phones, but it costs $9.99 per month or $1.99 per day.

(Next page: More Apps, Multimedia, and Conclusions)

More Apps, Multimedia, and Conclusions

Nokia Maps is more attractive than Bing Maps, integrates TripAdvisor reviews, and has both spoken turn-by-turn and transit directions. Unfortunately, the transit directions are buggy (telling me to take an express train to a local stop, for instance), and once I triggered the driving directions, I couldn’t figure out how to quit them—resulting in the phone telling me randomly to “turn right” at various other points in the evening.

Nokia has a deep bench of other exclusive apps, too. City Lens is an entertaining augmented-reality gimmick that superimposes map points of interest over your camera’s view. Nokia offers exclusive ESPN, ESPN Fantasy Football, and Sesame Street apps, as well as random items like the classic action-adventure game Mirror’s Edge. With Windows Phone well behind Apple and Android in the app race, your phone needs all the apps it can get, and Nokia has them.

AT&T also adds five apps of its own: a QR code scanner, the “AT&T FamilyMap” GPS tracker, Telenav, AT&T Radio (inferior to the free Nokia Music), and AT&T U-Verse Live TV ($9.99 per month for a range of big-name TV channels.)

Multimedia, Camera, and Camcorder
Nokia oversold the Lumia 920’s good but not extraordinary 8.7-megapixel still camera, but the video camera here is an industry leader. The company also adds some genuinely interesting, proprietary software to improve the camera experience.

The 8.7-megapixel shooter captures 3,552-by-2,000 images. In my tests, in good light, colors were very saturated and warm. Images were a little softer than on the HTC 8X, but appealingly so; the 8X’s pictures look like they’ve been through a sharpen filter. But the Lumia 920 doesn’t live up to its PureView branding because of its low-light performance. When I took a range of shots outside at dusk and inside during a party, the camera kicked shutter speeds down far enough to make all moving objects blurry. Yes, it does a very good job in low light if you’re taking pictures of something that’s absolutely still, but this camera isn’t a panacea if you need decent shutter speeds.

The 1-megapixel front camera takes shots with a slightly bluish cast, but the images have better dynamic range than phones like the HTC 8X, which tend to blow out bright backgrounds.

The video camera, on the other hand, managed to record smooth 1080p videos even in a dark party, and the optical image stabilization removed jitter in a way the 8X couldn’t match. Interestingly, the 8X’s videos—while stuck at a lower frame rate—were noticeably brighter, but I’ll take frame rate over brightness; you can fix brightness while editing. Nokia also offers some exclusive “lens” apps, including a basic photo editor and Cinemagraph, which turns still images into half-video things that look like animated GIFs.

Music and video performance is par for the course with Windows Phone; read our Windows Phone 8 OS review for the playback and syncing options. Nokia adds Nokia Music, an exclusive set of intelligent, streaming radio channels (either DJ-created or automatically spawned from a favorite artist) including the ability to cache mixes offline. This makes up for Windows Phone’s lack of Pandora Radio, for sure.

Video looks especially good on the Lumia 920’s screen, thanks to those very, very deep blacks. Audio works fine over wired or Bluetooth headsets, and there are custom EQ and Dolby options which improve an at-times-thin sound. Nothing generates the powerful bass of HTC’s Beats Audio, but some people don’t care for bass that thumping. The Lumia’s speakerphone, on the other hand, is considerably louder than the 8X’s. There is no apparent way to hook the Lumia 920 up to a TV for video out.

Conclusions
Windows Phone is an elegant, attractive OS which integrates very well with Windows 8 and is positively terrific for social networking. The major downside is that while you’ll be able to find apps you like, you probably won’t be able to find the same apps your friends with iOS or Android phones have. As the flagship WP8 handset, The Nokia Lumia 920 has many things going for it, and only one dealbreaking issue: It’s both huge and heavy. Whether you like big phones is a personal choice. I don’t, but all of the people who routinely abuse me in comments when I talk about this do, so there you have it.

Compared with other Windows Phones (not only the HTC 8X, but the Lumia 810, 820, 822, and the upcoming HTC 8S and Samsung Ativ Odyssey), this will likely be the most capable. It’ll probably have the best camera, the most built-in storage, the loudest built-in speaker, and the best screen. And Nokia’s software exclusives aren’t bloat: They’re needed. 

At $99.99, the Lumia 920 is a steal. It’s (perplexingly) $100 less than the 16GB HTC 8X, which is slimmer but slightly less capable, and it’s also $100 less than competing devices like the Apple iPhone 5 and Samsung Galaxy S III . You’re getting a lot of value for money here.

Should you buy the Lumia 920 instead of one of those phones? Ignore the price differences, and it all comes down to the platform. The Lumia 920 competes well with both of those phones on hardware. But with only 60 percent of the 95 top Android and Apple apps available on the Windows Phone platform, you have to be comfortable with being a maverick to choose a Windows Phone.

Until we see the third-party developer community rallying behind Windows Phone to the same extent it’s behind iOS and Android, we won’t award an Editors’ Choice award to a Windows Phone. I can’t call the Lumia 920 my personal choice, either, as it’s just too big and heavy for me. But it looks to be the best Windows 8 Phone so far, and if size and weight aren’t a concern, the Lumia 920 should be your Windows Phone choice.

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