Nokia Lumia 925

 As the model number would indicate, the Lumia 925 has a lot of similarities to the Lumia 920 that’s been available on AT&T for quite a while as well as the Lumia 928 which is available on Verizon in the US. This review will focus a bit more on what’s different with the T-Mobile version, and we’ll also take a look at the optional wireless charging shell available for the Lumia 925.

Specs

Compared to the other Lumia 92x series phones, you’ll find the same Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor clocked at 1.5GHz under the hood. The amount of memory hasn’t changed either: the Nokia Lumia 925 operates with 1GB of RAM. Internal storage has been reduced to 16GB and the battery is still a non-removable, 2,000mAh unit. Unfortunately, the on-board storage is still non-expandable via microSD card. The display, while still at 4.5 inches in diagonal, is now a PureMotion HD+ ClearBlack AMOLED screen, with the same 768 x 1280 resolution. This results in a PPI rating of 334, more than fine enough for everyone’s eyesight.

The camera, while still an 8.7-megapixel, PureView (stage two) construction, is improved, at least on paper. Nokia added a sixth lens — in addition to the five lenses on the Lumia 920 and Lumia 928 — which should further improve picture quality in both low-light and bright, optimal, conditions. Optical image stabilization (OIS) is present as part of the PureView package, and the low-light sensitivity is as good as it always was. The camera specs also include the 1/3-inch sensor, f/2.0 aperture, 26mm focal length lens, and a minimum of 8cm focus range. The main shooter is accompanied by an f/2.4 1.2-megapixel wide-angle front-facer.

FM Radio is back! Plug your headphones in to get that antenna going.

Other specifications include Bluetooth 3.0, WiFi a/b/g/n, a magnetometer, A-GPS, A-GLONASS, FM radio reciever and NFC. Everything is powered by the 2,000mAh battery, and our unit arrived running the Lumia Amber software release, which is Windows Phone 8.0.10327.77.

Hardware

Instead, the Lumia 925 is a completely new design with an aluminum rim all around the edges. These metal pieces are the antennae, but in practice the reception seems a bit weaker than previous Nokia Lumia phones on T-Mobile.

At the top you’ve got the handset speaker along with some sensors, and a 1.2-megapixel front-facing camera for HD Skype video calls. Then you’ve got a large 4.5-inch PureMotion HD+ AMOLED sscreen with print quality pixel density that makes everything look very smooth. Outdoor visibility is great and there’s a new Glance mode option that’s been resurrected from some of Nokia’s older Symbian phones.

On the right side there’s a series of thin metal buttons protruding from the edge for activating the camera, power, and volume up or down. The buttons are very easy to find with your fingers and they’ve got the perfect amount of tactile feedback.

On the bottom there’s nothing but a metal rim…

Just like on the left side.

On the top is the 3.5-millimeter headset jack, MicroUSB jack and a flush little drawer for the MicroSIM card.

On the back is the 8.7 megapixel camera with optical image stabilization, a Carl Zeiss lens, and a dual LED flash.

There’s also a speaker grill towards the bottom along with three metal contact points for the wireless charging shell accessories. The speaker has two little plastic bumps that keep it elevated a bit when laying on a table.

If you get a wireless charging shell, the speaker sound will be rerouted out the bottom through this little carved-out area.

The Nokia Lumia 925 feels very thin, which is especially good in the pocket, but not so great for holding with your hand. (Thanks to Day Lys for demonstrating pocket-ability above.) The rounded metal edges are a bit too thin and slippery. To fix this, I added the wireless charging shell which added some thickness as well as increased the grip area for a more comfortable hold. The wireless charging shell covers the back and corners of the device giving a bit more protection to the corners which could be very susceptible to dings when dropped.

Software

Regarding the Lumia 925′s GDR2 update of Windows Phone 8, there are still some bugs that haven’t been fixed. For example, the photos hub will still only load the first 100 photos in each album and if you get comment notifications for photos beyondn that 100 count, you won’t be able to read them in the integrated interface. Xbox Music also has not seen any improvements. Streaming music or downloading songs via Xbox Music Pass can still cause some excessive performance slow-downs or application crashes. On the other hand, Nokia has added some storage check settings panels that allow you more granular control of storage usage along with easy access to clearing out temporary files (such as copies of photos uploaded to SkyDrive).

The My Account app is good to keep around for tracking your usage, though the live tile no longer shows data usage which is the only aspect of T-Mobile accounts that isn’t unlimited these days. You’ll have to dig into the app to find that.

Another extremely cool feature of the Data Sense app which also shows up in the Wi-Fi Settings area is an option to map nearby Wi-Fi hotspots. This allows you to see different locatiosn for public Wi-Fi hotspots that you can travel to and then connect for your internet access needs. Of course, it needs some kind of internet access in order to download the map locations, but maybe you can memorize the locations and hop from one to the other as you go.

Camera

The camera on the Lumia 925 is slightly improved over the one on the Lumia 920. The sensor is the same, but Nokia has added a sixth lens for even better images. The unit is a PureView (stage two) 8.7-megapixel shooter with Carl Zeiss lens, and optical image stabilization.  You get a lot of fun apps and camera lenses from Nokia to use with the Lumia 925, but the Pro Cam app from the Lumia 1020 is not initially available. This camera lens for quality manual controls is expected to be coming to the Lumia 925 later on. By the way, the Lumia 925, does have the Settings > Applications> Photos+Camera option to set the default camera app. Currently you can choose to go straight to the Nokia Smart Cam app, but hopefully the Pro Cam will be available soon.

Performance

There were no issues with the Lumia 925. It really can’t get any smoother, though resuming some apps might require you to wait a couple of seconds until content refreshes or app resumes. However, for the benchmark addicts among you, the Nokia Lumia 925 scored 232.11 in WPBench, compared to 234.73 on Lumia 928. These scores are pretty much comparable to other Windows Phones.

In normal, day-to day usage, flipping through screens, scrolling in the browser, going through settings, launching apps, and other usual activities, are buttery smooth, and we have nothing to complain about… except for Xbox Music. That’s where things get frustratingly slow. It seems like every time you want to access some music in the store it has to go out on the internet to recheck your permissions for streaming/downloading and this takes forever. Furthermore, sometimes it doesn’t do the check properly and streaming doesn’t work. The Zune days were so much better for music on Windows Phone.

Battery Life

In terms of battery life, we found the Lumia 925′s 2,000mAh battery to be satisfactory. If you’re looking for more quantitative battery test results, you’ll find them already in our  review  of the international version. Before we got the WiFi calling set up correctly the battery was dying very quickly. As mentioned before, be sure to pin the WiFi Calling live tile to your start screen and make it its largest size so that you can see the error messages. Or else, just leave it turned off when not necessary. Of course, the battery life depends on what apps you’re using and all of the options you may have turned on or off, but for the most part We’ve been able to get through about 8-10 hours without issue. 

Call Quality/Network Performance

The Lumia 925 doesn’t seem to support 3G on T-Mobile so if there wasn’t a 4G HSDPA or LTE tower nearby, it would drop to 2G.  On the other hand, in New York City where there is LTE coverage sometimes, the speed is often in the 15Mb/s download and upload range.  That’s about 3 times faster than AT&T’s LTE network in the same area.

Pros

 beautiful design

 excellent screen

 great camera

 fluid, smooth, performance

 Wi-Fi calling

 Nokia software (HERE Suite, Nokia Music, Augmented reality apps, Glance mode, etc.)

Cons

 thin, slippery edges make the phone easy to drop

 only 16GB of internal storage with no expansion options

 wireless charging shells are not widely available

non-removable battery

 white color option is the only one available on T-Mobile USA