Nokia Lumia 720 review

Key Features: 4.3-inch 480 x 800 pixel IPS screen; Dual-core 1GHz Qualcomm MSM8227; Windows Phone 8 OS; 8GB internal memory, expandable; Unibody design; 6-megapixel camera with LED flash

Manufacturer: Nokia

Nokia Lumia 720 - Design, Screen and Connectivity

Introduction

Microsoft’s Windows mobile OS once only appealed to geeks and weirdos, but how times have changed. Windows Phone 8 is arguably the slickest mobile phone system available, and matched with Nokia’s great hardware design it makes mobiles like the Nokia Lumia 720 super-desirable.

The Nokia Lumia 720 is a solid mobile phone whose appeal is only dulled by a slightly too-high price and the lingering limitations of lower-end Windows mobiles.  

Nokia Lumia 720 – Design

Nokia’s Lumia phones are some of the most attractive you can buy. The Nokia Lumia 720 borrows the styling of the Lumia 800, a phone that managed to separate itself from the smartphone masses using a plastic body that felt as high-end as a swanky metal one.

It does this with a unibody-style design. You can’t remove the back plate, and any access to slots is granted through little trays that pop-out with the help of a paperclip – like the iPhone SIM tray. These two approaches to the bodywork help the Lumia 720 feel well-built and high-end.

There are two pop-out slots here, one for the microSIM on the top edge and another for the microSD memory card, on the left edge. 

Not all of the Lumia range phones have a memory card slot, but it is needed in mid-range mobiles like this. There’s just 8GB of internal memory, only 5.5GB of which you have access to. This will soon be gobbled up if you want to play music, games or videos on your phone.

However, the Nokia Lumia 720’s body is all smooth curves and soft-touch finish, giving it a great in-hand feel. Its build is superior to the Nokia Lumia 620, which uses a removable battery cover, is a bit chunkier and has less sophisticated curves. The Lumia 720 is less cute, but classier.

Like all the other Nokia Lumia phones, attention has been paid to button placement.

The button trio sits along the right edge like line of students waiting for assembly. The power button lies right under your thumb, the volume rocker just above it and the camera shutter button down the other end, roughly where it’d be positioned in a compact camera.

Unless you’re desperate to have access to the Lumia 720’s battery, there’s little to dislike about this phone’s body. Its colour saturated polycarbonate frame doesn’t show up scratches, it feels solid and looks great. It only misses out on some of the stylistic boldness of the top-end Lumias, which have more severe edges for a bit o’ extra Philippe Starck-style intensity.

Nokia Lumia 720 – Connectivity

The Lumia phones are about looks, but offer solid connectivity future-proofing too. Hardware connections are limited – just a microUSB slot and 3.5mm headphone jack alongside the memory card slot – but wireless is another story.

The Nokia Lumia 720 has Wi-Fi, GPS, NFC, Bluetooth 3.0, Wi-Fi hotspot creation and integrated cloud storage through Microsoft’s Skydrive service. All you miss out on is 4G, which doesn’t generally feature in phones of this price yet.

Nokia Lumia 720 – Screen

A long-standing complaint of Windows phones is that they’ve tended to offer low screen resolutions. Nokia remedied that with the Lumia 920, which has a 720p screen, but the Lumia 720 is stuck with 480 x 800 pixels.

This is low for a 4.5-inch screen like the Lumia 720’s. Native areas in the operating system don’t look too bad as Windows Phone 8 employs text smoothing to mitigate the rubbish resolution. However, third-party apps and browsing show up the blocky screen clearly. And even Microsoft’s best efforts can’t mask that the Google Nexus 4 – a phone of a similar price – has well over twice the number of pixels and is much sharper as a result.

Display quality is decent thanks to the Nokia Lumia 720’s IPS panel. However, it seems to use some form of image sharpening that creates some harsh-looking aftefacts in high-contrast images.

Nokia Lumia 720 - Windows Phone 8, Apps and Games

Nokia Lumia 720 – Windows Phone 8

Windows Phone 8 is Microsoft’s attempt to be as un-Microsoft as it can muster. It’s a quick and stylish-looking system that – like iOS – values the quality of the core user experience over flexibility.

It comes in two halves. The front page is a scroll of Live Tiles – these are colourful blocks that act as notifications for when you get new emails, links to your online social life and your favourite apps. For anyone who has used Windows Phone 7, the previous version of the OS, it’ll all seem eerily familiar. A key change is that Windows Phone 8 lets you create super-small Live Tiles for a more efficient home screen.

One of Windows Phone 8’s greatest successes is that it started to value practicality as well as being terribly stylish and sophisticated. This results in being able to transfer files without having to use irritating Zune software (as you did with Windows Phone 7), a lifting of the memory card ban of the previous version and a bunch of other bits and bobs that made Windows Phone more accessible – and made phones like the Lumia 720 possible.

The loosening of Windows Phone's restrictions in Windows Phone 8 hasn't seen a drop in quality, either. It's as snappy as ever, even if the 1GHz dual-core Snapdragon CPU and 512MB are generally bettered by many £250 Android phones these days.

It remains something of a 'Marmite' system, though. Microsoft has forced the Windows Phone 8 user interface style into reams of third-party apps, and it doesn’t always lead to the most intuitive of app experiences.

Nokia Lumia 720 – Apps and Games

The Nokia Lumia 720 is limited to the apps selection you’ll find on the Windows Marketplace. This is not well equipped when compared to the stores of Android or iOS.

It has fewer apps, and the apps it does have tend to be less well-maintained than an iPhone’s. For example, the Facebook app is less feature-rich and intuitive – and it’s hardly great on iOS as it is.

There are a few crackers pre-installed on the Lumia 720, though – the Nokia apps suite now known as Here, in order to let the apps sit on other phones more happily, gets top billing.

The most useful of the Here bunch for the majority of people will be Here Maps. This is Nokia’s Google Maps equivalent. It’s a solid mapping app with a killer feature – you can download maps of whole continents for use offline. 

It’s the perfect app for navigating on holiday without maxing-out a credit card with roaming charges.

There’s also an in-car GPS navigation app, which using the same mapping system but with an interface designed to be used in-car. These two Here apps are a solid reason to choose a Windows Phone 8 phone over a mid-range Android if you're looking to replace your GPS gadget with a phone - Google Maps doesn't let you cache map info in the same way.

Nokia Lumia 720 – Music and Video

There’s also a Nokia-made music interface in the Lumia 720. It’s called Nokia Music and gives you access to free music mixes made by Nokia, as well as a paid-for music store. Having free mixes to listen to is neat, but it’s the sort of attraction that’ll lose its shine once used a couple of times.

Windows Phone 8 also provides a more generic music and video player. It uses the same fancy UI found in the system’s app store and menu system. It’s fast and looks good.

Given how limited Windows Phone 7 mobiles were, the Nokia Lumia 720 offers solid multimedia skills too. Files can be dragged ‘n’ dropped onto the phone without any tiresome sync process, and it can handle videos other than the absolute basics off the bat, including DivX and Xvids. MKVs will need to be converted, but when transferring them using a PC, Windows offers to do this for you.

We recommend using headphones whenever possible, as while the mono internal speaker will do for the odd YouTube clip shared among friends, it doesn't raise its game above the smartphone doldrums.

Nokia Lumia 720 - Camera, Battery Life and Verdict

Nokia Lumia 720 – Call Quality and Battery Life

Like virtually every aspect of the Lumia 720, the call quality of the phone is decent. It uses an additional microphone to provide active noise cancellation in noisy environments, and the earpiece speaker offers decent clarity, with a mids-heavy sound that cuts through in ambient noise pretty well.

Battery life is also commendable. The Lumia 720 has a 2,000mAh battery, and with moderate use we coasted through a day and half without a charge. Light users should be able to squeeze two days out of the phone. 

Nokia Lumia 720 – Camera

The Nokia Lumia 720 has two cameras. There’s a 6.1-megapixel sensor on the rear with an LED flash and a basic 1.3MP video chat camera on the front.

Photos are high on contrast and have punchy colours for a mid-range phone. The Nokia Lumia 720 doesn’t have the optical image stabilisation of the Lumia 920 or the (relatively) huge sensor of the PureView 808. However, it's an above average camera for a mid-range phone, no doubt in part to the fast f/1.9 lens used.

It also benefits from the ease of the camera interface of Windows Phone 8. It’s very stripped-back, and you can take a photo with a single press on the touchscreen preview – which makes the phone both on focus on that spot and take a snap.










However, it doesn’t give you instant access to a bunch of neat filters and such, which you get with an Android phone. Instead you have to apply what Microsoft calls lenses, which are filters or mini-apps for the camera.

The Nokia Lumia comes with Bing Vision and Smart Shoot lenses pre-installed. These are augmented reality and burst mode apps – the latter designed to take a bunch of photos of people in a row in order to let you pick and save the best.

There’s tons of functionality missing from the app as standard – HDR, panorama, standard filters and more. You can download extra lenses that supply these features from the Windows Marketplace, but as with any app store-based activity it’s a crapshoot. And many of the lenses aren’t free. Lenses are a great idea, but we’d like to see the basics like HDR and panorama included as standard.  

Value

As with any low-end or mid-range phone that isn’t a complete car crash, the Nokia Lumia 720 lives and dies by its price. It’s available from £239 SIM-free, meaning it is level with the Google Nexus 4, £80 more than the HTC 8S and and around £100 more expensive than its baby brother, the Lumia 620.

It can’t compete with the Nexus 4, which is just about as slick, has a far superior screen and stronger apps selection. And although it offers reasonable value the Lumia 720 isn’t quite the Windows star the Nokia Lumia 620 is, despite being superior in most respects. Our advice is to wait for the inevitable price drop if you can. 

Verdict

The Nokia Lumia 720 is a good-looking phone that offers the snappy performance you can expect of a Windows Phone 8 device. We’d like to see it sell a little under its standard retail price thanks to its ageing screen technology, given a more bitter edge by the still-limited apps and games selection of Windows Phone. However, it’s a more-than-sound introduction to the Windows Phone 8 platform if that’s what you’re after.