Lumia 925 Launched Locally

A few days ago Nokia Philippines held the launch event of their newest smartphone, the Nokia Lumia 925, at Salon De Ning in Manila Peninsula. The Lumia 925 succeeds their current flagship, the Lumia 920. This new smartphone packs relatively the same specifications but it does have a sleeker and more premium chassis and improved optics.

When it comes to the hardware, the Lumia 925 can hold its own against high class flagship Android models in the market today. The Lumia 925 is wrapped with an aluminum band that adds a whole lot of style and flair to it. In addition to the aesthetic improvements, the aluminum band also helps with phone reception according to Nokia reps. Lastly, Nokia also managed to bring down the weight and over-all heft (which was a major criticism thrown at the Lumia 920) which makes the Lumia 925 much easier to handle and use even with just one hand.

Let’s talk about the Camera

According to Gary Chan, Nokia Pan Asia head of Marketing, the Lumia 925 houses 6 physical lenses which heightens focus and allows for better light capture. In fact, the Nokia Lumia 925 is currently the strongest low-light smart-phone camera to date, beating its predecessor the Lumia 920 (at least according to paper).

Here’s a side-by-side test:

 

 

 

What does make the 925 work best will be the camera apps that come along with it. One notable app is the Smart Camera App. Although the 920 has a similarly named app called Smart Shoot, the Smart Camera uses the burst-shot technology and uses it in the most creative of ways. This actually brings selfies to a whole new level of well, creativity/absurdity. Hahaha.

Notable features of the Smart Camera are the action shots which lines up a series of photos and create a dramatic action sequence that you can play around with. Here are some sample shots:

 

 

 

 

With the Smart Camera app, you can also remove objects from a particular photo to get rid of candid photobombers (well assuming you have one or two shots without said photobomber in photo). What Smart Camera does is it lines up your shots and recomposes them to your specification with a tap on the screen.

We reached out to Nokia to confirm if the Smart Camera app would eventually be rolled out to the previous windows phone 8 Lumia lines as well. So far, no official word yet but we speculate that they will do that eventually.

No more built-in wireless charging

With the 925 slimming down, Nokia took out the native wireless charging capabilities via NFC versus the Lumia 920. However, with a simple snap-on cover, you can pair this with your Nokia wireless charging stand or plate. And even with the snap-on in place, the phone is still significantly slimmer than the Lumia 920!

 

SOME INTERESTING NEWS

Aside from the 925 Launch, Nokia surprised us with a few other announcements. One of them was the 41-megapixel camera Lumia giant, the Nokia Lumia 1020. Though there are no specifications regarding the 1020, they did mention that they are working hard to roll this out before the year ends! Hence expect another press announcement by Q4 this year!

Gary Chan proceeded in discussing the Lumia Amber update. This improves on current Lumia apps like HERE Maps and City Lens (giving Lumias true turn-by-turn navigation around the city) and adds a variety of other tweaks to the whole Lumia range. The 925 is the first phone that has been pre-loaded with the Amber update already. According to Nokia, Lumia users should be able to update their software in a couple of weeks’ time. More on this when we get our hands on the update (or on a Lumia 925 hehe).

AVAILABILITY AND PRICE

The Nokia Lumia 925 will be available at Nokia Stores and at Nokia Solutions Partners this coming August 19, 2013 at Php 23, 5000.00 which is Php 3,500.00 less than when the Lumia 920 was launched! @_@

On the telco side Smart will be offering the Nokia Lumia 925 FREE when bundled with the Unlimited Data Plan at Plan 1500 with a 30-month lock-in period.

The Nokia Lumia 925 will be available in white, grey (close to brushed silver actually) and black.

 

BUY THIS IF
If you can’t wait for the 1020 or you want a super sleek Windows Phone 8 flagship phone. The high-end Lumia ranges (from the 920 up) can rival any other flagship phones in the market out there. The sleek design makes you want to bring the phone out and show it off to as many people as you can. Buy this if you also don’t like the loud colors from the other Lumia devices. The brushed silver variant looks gorgeous!

SKIP THIS IF
If you’re waiting for something truly ground-breaking then you might want to wait a few months before for the release of the Nokia Lumia 1020—the “true” Pureview Camera Phone dubbed by geekdom. It houses the Nokia Pureview 808’s 41 megapixel oversampling technology as well as the Lumia 920’s OIS tech to give you unparalleled imaging quality.

Editor’s Note: All the photos were taken using the Nokia Lumia 920 at automatic settings without flash -assist and flash, unless otherwise specified.