Nokia announced the Lumia 925 today in London, and I want to talk about it before Google steals all the oxygen tomorrow with the I/O keynote (which I will definitely be half-watching on a laggy livestream at 9am Pacific while pretending to work).
The headline thing about the 925 is that its the first Lumia with an actual metal frame — aluminum edges holding a polycarbonate back, instead of the usual solid slab of colored plastic Nokia's been shipping since the 800. I own a Lumia 920 (long story, a friend talked me into it over a Nexus 4 last winter and I've gone back and forth on regretting it ever since) and that phone is a genuine brick. Its 185 grams, which doesn't sound like much until you've been holding it in one hand on a bus for twenty minutes and your wrist starts complaining. So Nokia trimming the weight down and swapping some of that polycarbonate for aluminum isn't just a design flourish, it actually addresses the thing I complain about most when people ask me if they should buy one.
Specs-wise its a 4.5 inch OLED display at 1280x768, a 1.2GHz-ish dual-core Snapdragon, 1GB of RAM, and an 8.7 megapixel PureView camera with optical image stabilization, a smaller sensor than the 920's camera but apparently tuned better for daylight shots, which is where the 920 always felt a little soft to me anyway. Nokia's pitching it as the "aspirational" model above the 920, not a replacement, which is a very Nokia way of avoiding admitting the 920 is basically obsolete less than a year after launch. It's supposed to land in the UK and a few other markets in June, somewhere around 469 euros off contract before anyone starts subsidizing it.
Here's my actual opinion on this, since I try not to just recite spec sheets like a press release: the industrial design here matters more than people are going to give it credit for, because Windows Phone's biggest problem was never really the OS. Its fine. Its actually kind of nice once you stop expecting it to behave like Android. The problem is the app gap — I still cant get a decent Instagram client that doesn't feel like it was built by someone reverse-engineering the API from screenshots, and my bank's app just doesn't exist on the platform, full stop. No amount of aluminum fixes that. But if Nokia's strategy is "make hardware so nice that people tolerate the app situation," the 925 is at least a more convincing argument for that than the 920 ever was. The 920 was nice hardware buried under so much bulk that it undercut its own pitch.
I also think its funny that Nokia keeps calling every camera improvement "PureView" regardless of whether it has anything to do with the original PureView tech from the 808 (41 megapixels, remember that thing?). The 925's camera is a completely different animal, smaller sensor, OIS instead of oversampling, and it gets the same branding anyway. Marketing team's call I guess, but it muddies what PureView is even supposed to mean at this point. If they're saving the actual big sensor for something later in the summer I wont be shocked.
Anyway. Tomorrow is Google I/O and I expect the entire tech internet to spend the next four days talking about whatever gets announced on that stage, so I wanted to get this out today while the Lumia news still has a little room to breathe on its own. If you're the kind of person who's been eyeing a Windows Phone but couldn't get past how the 920 felt like carrying a paperweight around, the 925 is worth actually going and holding at a store once it ships, rather than judging off spec sheets. That's usually where these phones win or lose me anyway, not on a chart, but in my hand for thirty seconds in a mall.