REVIEW: Nokia Lumia 925

I am at the age now where when confronted by an unfamiliar remote control I panic and don’t know which buttons to press.

When I recently upgraded my phone I specifically chose the exact same model as Boyfriend, just so that he could show me how to work it. I currently have an HTC One X+, so had just about got to grips with Android, when I was asked to review the Nokia Lumia 925 with Windows.

Argh!

*deep breaths*

‘You can do it,’ I reassured myself. ‘If you can give birth to two children and run your own business then surely you can get to grips with a new phone?’

The Nokia Lumia 925 is pretty much exactly the same size, shape and weight as my current phone, and has a similar screen size. I liked the design, and it felt nice in my hand – big enough to have a decent sized screen but not so big you look like you’re making a call on an iPad mini. It’s great for photographers as apparently has one of the smartest phone cameras available at the moment and is particularly good in low light. I was keen then to put the camera to the test.

The Noika Lumia 925 runs Windows Phone 8, which is the latest version of Microsoft’s mobile operating system, and has the distinctive tiled start screen. Each of the tiles is a link to an individual application and can be moved around or resized. What’s nice though is that these aren’t just short cuts as you would get on an iPhone – they do actually contain information too, like mini widgets.

We took the Nokia Lumia 925 with us to Tyntesfield, a local National Trust property. It was the last day of the summer holidays and we wanted to combine one last day out  with my sister, niece and nephew with a trip to spot one of the 80 Gromits than have been on display throughout Bristol over the summer. (I went a bit mad taking pictures of them so if you want to see lots then check me out on Instagram.)

We were using the Gromit Unleashed app to track our adventures. It used GPS to tell us how close we were and then we could mark off on a map which Gromits we had seen.

After having spotted the Tyntesfield Gromit we did a little bit of den building amongst the bamboo. It was pretty gloomy in the den so was a great chance to test out the low light photography. The picture certainly came out well without the flash but I did wonder if perhaps it wasn’t a little bit too green? This isn’t how the plants actually looked in real life and although it’s great to get a decent shot, should this be at the expense of realism? Maybe it should. It does look good.

Back at home, I decided to test it out indoors. I waited until evening, when we just had a couple of lamps on, and tested it out against my current phone. I did one picture of my desk and another of a room in Belle’s Sylvanian Family hotel, all without using the flash. As you can see, the results from the Nokia are pretty impressive.

With a 1.5GHz dual-core processor and just 1GB of RAM the Nokia Lumia 925 isn’t top of the range horsepower wise, but for a technoramus like me it’s absolutely fine – I can’t say I noticed a difference in the performance from my HTC One X+, and that has a 1.7GHz quad-core processor. It does suffer though, like my old Blackberry, from not having the same range of apps that you can get on iPhone and Android, so this could be something to consider if you like your little games and gadgets.

If you’re a music lover though, you’ll enjoy Nokia Music with Mix Radio, a free music streaming service exlcusive to Nokia Lumia phones. It comes pre-installed on your handset and there are no ads or subscription fees. As well as searching the catalogue and Nokia’s preselected playlists, you can also create your own. Tell your phone your three favourite artists and it will come up with a playlist just for you, based on what it thinks your choices say about your music tastes – a cool little function for parties when you want to set a particular mood.

It’s also a very easy way to discover new music. I put in Laura Marling, Seth Lakeman and Mumford and Sons and it came up with a great mix of artists that I really like already and some that I hadn’t heard of before.

Another little thing I like is that when you plug it into your computer, you get a little picture of it! I know this is a very silly thing to say and absolutely not a reason to buy a phone but I liked it. Navigating around the phone from the computer was much simpler than the HTC too.

Overall I thought it was a very decent phone with some interesting features but I’d love to hear about your experiences of the Nokia Lumia series. Do you have one? What do you love and hate about it?

DISCLOSURE: I was sent the Nokia Lumia 925 for a couple of weeks to try out for the purposes of this review. I was also compensated for my time/costs involved in our day out to Tyntesfield but I donated half of this to the Gromit Unleashed campaign. All of my views are my own.