Variety is the spice of life, this applies to anything in your life. This is especially true in the phone market. Most people think of Android and iOS phones when thinking of modern smart phones but the third largest in popularity are Windows phones. Not only are they third, but their popularity has continued to grow. It’s about time that we get one in and see what all of the buzz is about. The latest and greatest Windows phone is the Nokia Icon, I have been living with it for a few weeks now and I am excited to tell you guys/girls about the phone and my experience with it.

Product Name: Verizon Wireless Nokia Lumia Icon

Review Sample Provided by: Verizon Wireless

Written by: Wes

Pictures by: Wes

Packaging

Being a Verizon phone the packaging for the Icon wasn’t really any different than what I have seen from other phones. You get a bright red box with the Verizon and Windows logos on the cover. The Nokia logo is embossed into the cover as well. Inside, below the icon itself, you have a whole stack of documentation. Most of the paperwork is related to consumer information for radio frequencies and warranties, nothing that you are going to want to spend too much time looking at. All of the real documentation on the Icon itself is actually online.

Beyond the phone you get a USB data/charging cable as this oval USB to AC charging adapter for when you are away from your PC.

Design

Taking the OS out of the equation the Icon is without a doubt one of the best phones I have ever had the chance to look at. The quality of the phone is the first thing you will notice with it, its all-aluminum construction gives it a solid feel. Combine that with the beveled glass that I have seen on a few other phones now and you have a really cool phone. The interesting thing is Nokia didn’t go with flashy colors like on their previous phones and they didn’t need a Kevlar weave in the back panel to catch your attention like the MAXX, it’s the quality that does it, just like on an iPhone.

Starting on the front of the Icon we can see the bevel in the glass near the edges. The only break in the glass is for the speaker slot. Next to it you also have the front facing camera that stands out against the black trim. The front facing camera is no slouch on the Icon with its 1280 x 960 photo resolution as well as its capability to record video in 720p. Also up top are the Verizon and Nokia logos.

Down at the bottom things are simple. There are three integrated buttons, the windows key, back, and a search button. This is similar to the three button layout on Android phones as well, substituting the windows key for the home button. Also most Android phones integrate the button into the screen itself to gain extra real estate when watching videos and playing games.

Down along the bottom edge is our charging/data connection with a silver line on each side of it to highlight it. Nokia stuck with the same Micro-USB plug that nearly everything other than the iPhone uses. This is great for someone like me who has multiple devices that need charged around the house, I can plug in anywhere and pack fewer chargers when traveling. Nokia also integrated full Qi Wireless charging into the Icon as well to make things even easier!

Along the right side of the phone we will find all of the phones buttons. To the right (closest to the top of the phone) is the volume toggle. In the middle is the power button, this isn’t where I would have expected to see the power/lock button but it is still worlds better than the LG G2. Down at the bottom is the camera button, holding this will open up the camera app, even when the phone is locked. Having a dedicated camera button is always nice and isn’t a big surprise considering the focus on photography with the Icons two top notch camera’s.

Up top we have the same double lines that were also on the bottom, but this time they go around the headphone plug. Having the headphone plug is a big benefit to anyone who puts their phone in their pocket while listing to music on headphones. Phones with the headphone port on the bottom or side for example make doing that much harder.

The only thing on the left side of the Icon is the SIM card slot that is tucked away in a hard to pull out tray. It’s great that it can be swapped out but in this phones case, being on Verizon, it only is related to the 4G data.

The back of the Icon is all aluminum as well and they matched the same bevel that I saw on the glass as well. Beyond that the only thing of interest is the camera and LED flash. Nokia really went all out with the Icon’s rear facing camera with a 20MP sensor, I can’t wait to see how it performs.

Booting the phone up its 5 inch 1080p screen takes us right into the tiled home screen of Windows Phone 8, I will talk about how everything performed in the next section.

Performance

Once beyond my initial impressions with the Icon I had to actually settle into the phone by moving my contacts over, installing applications that I use frequently, and get used to where everything in the OS is. Moving from android phone to android phone this is never a big deal for me but when moving to something completely different like this or the blackberry z10 it takes a little more time. This of course really isn’t the fault of Nokia’s or Microsoft even. I quickly installed foursquare, facebook, and even found a way to attach my Gmail email accounts to the phone in no time at all. My standard Reddit app on android wasn’t available but after some searching I did find another that had a high rating. I didn’t however find replacements for Snapchat for example, I thought this was a little odd considering how popular the app is.

Once I was done looking for apps and games I moved on to customizing my experience to fit me. With Android and iOS this is fairly simple, there are only a few home pages and there are a limited number of spots to put your links/widgets. Windows Phone OS takes a more fluid approach with just a single page that you can scroll for as long as you would like. A tile can be a link to an app or a widget or both. An example of this is the people tile that constantly changes but when clicked opens up my people listing. Each tile can be resized both larger and to a very small size allowing you to give priority to apps that you use more often by making them larger and easier to see while still keeping important but lesser used tiles up near the top in a group of small tiles. As a Windows 8 laptop owner the design of this is no different than the tiles that I see in my start menu, so picking this up and customizing it took almost no time at all for me. Once customized there is a lot to be said about the tiled layout, it is very functional, although as a regular android user I would like to see more options on changing the overall look when customizing the home screen to fit me.

I touched on it a little with the mention of the missing Snapchat app but one of the biggest issues I ran into with the Windows Phone OS was the lower quality and quantity of apps. It reminds me a LOT of just a few years back when android played second fiddle to iOS when it came to apps. There just isn’t a large selection of apps and the apps I did find in the store that would be free on Android will sometimes run you a few bucks here. When looking for a google voice app for example all I could find were paid apps capitalizing on the lack of an official google app. This is understandable, but iOS does have some google app support, hopefully as Windows Phone OS becomes more popular this might become more of a priority for Google (not likely though). More importantly, apps that I did have like the Facebook app were worlds apart from the Android and iOS apps. Even navigating the Facebook app was a challenge. If I got a notification that someone replied to a status update, clicking on it would take me to the status update but you then have to open up the comments to see what they said. Photos in comments don’t show up as well.

When it came to email performance, I did run into issues with the stock email app not getting push notifications from my Gmail and just taking a long time to sync as a whole. Switching over to a POP email configuration did help this slightly, but what I wouldn’t give for a proper Gmail app that gets its notifications before my PC ever sees them.

Microsoft is doing everything they can to provide their own high quality apps to make up for it though. A great example of this is the free copy of Microsoft Office that comes with the phone. I have spent a lot of time trying to find office equivalent apps on Android and here we have the real thing. If only there was a Dropbox app and I would actually be able to get a little work done on the go.

Back to the phone itself, I was extremely happy with the performance of both the front facing and inside facing cameras on the Icon. When paired up with Nokia’s camera app you have every option available on a point and shoot camera built into your smartphone. The 20MP camera helped as well of course. I had the chance to snap a few photos in both low and high light situations and the detail was very impressive. I even snapped a picture of my finger to test its macro capabilities and frankly it was detailed enough that I decided it might not be the best idea to publish a detailed photo of my fingerprint.

Cats inside, daytime with no flash

Outside, daytime

Inside with flash

Front facing camera

When not taking photos with my smartphone or browsing the interwebs you will most likely catch me on a conference call or listing to music. My Nexus 4 has always done a poor job when putting people on speakerphone or playing music, especially when compared directly to a phone like the Icon. When on speakerphone I could hear everything perfectly something I can’t say about every phone with my slight hearing damage. Audio playback was just as good and could be played all the way to max volume without any issues. The best part of it all was that the alarm did a perfect job of waking me up when I needed it, except when I set it to cat sounds and I ignored them until my wife woke me up freaking out thinking a stray cat got into the house.

When it came time to actually do performance testing on the Icon I found myself a little more limited than I normally would me. For one a few of the benchmarks that I normally use haven’t made it to Windows Phone OS just yet, like 3Dmark. On top of that the apps I had like GFXBench were a little out of date and missing the battery benchmark that we use. Google Octane’s latest version continued to lock up on me as well. So my apologies for the short list of performance benchmarks this time around.

The performance tests I did manage to fit in tell an interesting story though. GFXBench show that the Icon’s 3D performance was a little on the low side, coming in lower than all of the phones I have tested recently with the exception of the older Shield. In Browsermark on the other hand the Icon’s Qualcomm Snapdragon™ 800 really pulled its weight putting in numbers up near the Shield and around the same as the MotoX. In the last test SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark, the Icon performed even better pulling ahead of the MotoX considerably. It’s obvious the Icon is extremely fast. With just the one benchmark that focuses on gaming performance I can’t tell if this is an issue with this benchmark or a larger issue. Hopefully the next Windows Phone OS phone that I get in will have more benchmarks available.

Sadly without a battery benchmark I wasn’t able to see where the Icon stand compared to the competition. I can however say that with its 2420 mAh battery it did perform well in my testing, but I doubt it will compete with the big battery phones. Nokia does say that it is capable of 9 hours of talk time when using 3g. They also mention that you can get a maximum cellular network browsing time of 6.8 h and 9.2hours on wi-fi. With the wireless charging being available I didn’t run into any issues with the battery getting to low, even during our last LAN event where my phone dies quickly due to all of the people contacting me in combination with being in a large metal building that puts a hurting on cell reception.

Overall and Final Verdict

With the Icon being the first Windows Phone OS phone that I have had the chance to check out I ended up spending more time adjusting to the new OS than I typically would. With that though I found a new appreciation for the OS and can see why it is growing in popularity. iOS and Android seem to be going down a similar path but Windows Phone OS is carving a new path all together. Is it the best option? Well I think there still needs to be a little more work and a lot more work on the app options and quality. However, one thing is for sure, the Icon is one of if not the best option as far as Windows Phone’s go. Nokia packed two great cameras into an extremely high quality device. On top of that, the performance of the phone itself was top notch, except for in our gaming benchmark. My only disappointment with the phone itself is simply that there won’t be an Android equivalent available. My reliance on Android has grown with all of my Android tablets, the Shield, and my phones and I just have to much invested to move until there are comparable apps on Windows Phone OS. If a Windows Phone is a possibility for you though, I would highly suggest checking out the Icon.

Author Bio

Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org

Editor-in-chief

You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.