Nokia Lumia 820 review: First look and initial impressions

The Nokia Lumia 820 is the successor to the Lumia 800. Arguably the best designed handset of 2011, the Lumia 800 combined masterful use of plastic, beautiful curved glass and bold colour choices. It’s biggest limitation however? Windows Phone 7.5. As clean an OS as it was, Windows Phones of old had a few gaping holes in terms of usability. With many of these plugged in Windows Phone 8, the Nokia Lumia 820 hopes to be the handset the 800 should have been, outside and in.

You can see from the bold design that Nokia hasn't lost any of its flair since the 800. Our Lumia 820 is an incredibly vibrant, bold yellow, though the phone is also available in cyan, grey, red and white to name a few.

The way to change the colour is to change the back cover and that’s the first surprise about the 820 - it isn’t a unibody device. In spite of this, it feels solid, well weighted  and dense - all good things.

The WVGA AMOLED display is very comparable to that of the Nokia Lumia 800 when it comes to resolution and general performance. That said, it is larger at 4.3-inches and more immersive. Arguably a little on the unsharp side, results are still eye-popping on first impression with bright colours and deep blacks, showcasing Windows Phone 8 beautifully.

While there’s no optical image stabilisation, the Nokia Lumia 820 is specced up on the photography front. On top of an 8-megapixel camera loaded with an f/2.2 lens, it also takes advantage of Nokia’s digital lenses such as those found on the Lumia 920, including one to rival Samsung’s Best Face, called Perfect Shot. This takes a number of photos and allows you to choose each person’s expression individually.

Powered by a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor clocked at 1.5GHz, the Nokia Lumia 820 has the same guts as its brother and other key Windows Phone 8 handsets. To find out exactly how the Lumia 820 performs in the real world, read our full review here.