Nokia Lumia 920 First Impressions

So, after eagerly awaiting the Nokia event in New York for the last couple of weeks it's finally all over.

I currently use a Nokia Lumia 800, I love the Windows Phone 7.5 OS (although I'm painfully aware of some of it's limitations), and was hoping to see a raft of features on offer that would have me taking a hammer to the piggy bank.

The hammer, I'm sad to say, is staying in the garage for a while.

The Lumia 920 is indeed an excellent looking phone, and from as much as we've been told ticks most, if not all, of the boxes for me. Except one.

Whilst Windows Phone 8 (re)introduces support for SD cards, and there is an MicroSD card slot on the mid-range Lumia 820, this is sadly lacking on the 920.

Why?

Don't get me wrong, the 32Gb of on-board memory is quite good, but I fear on a phone that I hope to keep using for at least two years this will get filled up pretty quickly.

I've had the Lumia 800 since early this year and I'm already at the stage where purchased applications take up the lions share of internal memory, leaving me limited space for music and movies. I regularly see a "not enough space" message when updating the libraries for the following day. This is a situation I can only see getting worse with the new applications that will begin to appear.

Sure, the Lumia 920 features double the memory of my Lumia 800, but it's still not enough, especially considering that the new screen is begging to be used to view movies.

So 32Gb of memory will lead to compromises, whilst 32Gb with a MicroSD slot and a card of 64Gb (or possibly higher in the future?) giving 96Gb of space would lead to... well, fewer compromises (yes I really do have that much music, and it's not always possible/practical to stream music).

So the Lumia 920 is still in the running, especially if the Nokia software bundle is as strong as it has been on the current models, but this one seemingly simple omission has got me considering alternatives. It's not the no-brainer I was hoping it would be.

I wonder how that Samsung Ativ S will turn out...