Nokia Lumia 900 Review - Windows Phone with LTE
by Brian Klug on April 3, 2012 9:00 PM ESTPerformance
Performance on Windows Phone 7.5 at the moment tops out at almost the same place for virtually every handset. As I touched on before, the platform is still a Qualcomm-only party, and the name of the game is single core 45nm Snapdragon with Adreno 205 at the high end in the form of either MSM8x55, or for the Lumia 900 APQ8055 at 1.4 GHz.
I’ve already penned some thoughts on WP7’s current chassis spec, and in the future the specification will open up with the Tango update (which we’ve seen in the Lumia 610) to a lower-end configuration with MSM7x30 or MSM7x27A. Eventually Windows Phone will move onto dual core SoCs and possibly more vendors, but when and how that happens remains to be seen. The driving factors will undoubtably be both performance, but also improvements to things around the edges like 1080p video encode, decode, and power gains from a 28nm process geometry.
For now however let’s focus on the Lumia 900, which again is 1.4 GHz APQ8055 with 512 MB of LPDDR2. Benchmarking WP7.5 still is a pretty basic thing, since platform consistency somewhat obviates the need for many of the other big cross-platform benchmarks (this will change with Windows 8, however). For now that means our testing is limited primarily to assessing javascript performance with sunspider, browsermark, and WP Bench.
| WPBench Comparison | ||||
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HTC Surround (1.0 GHz QSD8250) |
Nokia Lumia 800 (1.4 GHz MSM8255) |
Nokia Lumia 710 (1.4 GHz MSM8255) |
Nokia Lumia 900 (1.4 GHz APQ8055) |
|
| Total Score | 61.58 | 91.14 | 92.85 | 89.09 |
| Result Screenshot |
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At this point all the most modern WP7 devices are still shipping with essentially the same SoC - 1.4 GHz 45nm MSM8x55/APQ8055. For comparison, the initial launch devices were 65nm QSD8x50 at 1 GHz. With the Tango update performance differences will start to be more of a thing for consumers to care about as it becomes possible to select a phone with a lower end SoC that still runs the Windows Phone UI at a decent clip (like the Lumia 610 we’ve handled). As a result, it isn't surprising at all to see the WP7.5 devices with the same exact SoC all clumped together and performing basically the same. In addition, though the WP7.5 IE JavaScript engine (Chakra) is a huge improvement upon the WP7 JScript engine, it still lags behind the competition on Android and iOS.
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BabelHuber - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
---> Can be used like a USB-stick. No iTunes/ Zune needed. Simply plug your phone into your PC and use the Explorer you like--> I can connect USB-harddiscs to my Asus TF Prime. Like in Windows, I can messs around with a file explorer there
--> File explorer: Android has a real Linux file system. You can handle files like you have always done with computers. Hence cloud-services are not mandatory.
--> Supports SD cards including full access via file explorer
--> Allows installation of apps that were not downloaded via Google Play/ market. You can install whatever you want
--> Real multitasking
--> Allows tweaking: I have e.g. installed the rSAp-functionality on my Android phone last weekend:
I have installed new system libraries, maually replaced system files etc. to get it work.
It was a lot of effort, but at least I could do it. My warranty is gone now, though.
To sum it up: Android is like a real Personal Computer. You can do whatever you want with it, there are no restrictions whatsoever.
As a downside, you can mess up your phone completely, too. But this is the price of freedom
steven75 - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
Ah so all things 99% of the market doesn't need or want. Gotcha!eddman - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
iphone does not support them and still sells millions. Most people don't care about those features on a phone.ol1bit - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
I do, and I know lots of others who like that as well, otherwise, why have a smart phone?eddman - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
I said most, not all. Obviously for users who want those features, android is the only choice.I'm just saying that the lack of those features won't necessarily impact the sales, judging from how well iphones sold and keep selling.
BabelHuber - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link
Well, from my experience some iOS-users don't even know that functionality is missing.When I quickly use my phone as USB-stick to transmit data from one notebook to another, they even are surprised (and yes, such things don't occur often, but sometimes this comes in handy)
Or when I browse my files using an actual browser, they are surprised that I don't have to open an App first.
Some users are so locked into the Apple ecosystem that they don't even expect their smartphone to act as a small PC, even though it is one.
They act as if their phone was a fixed-function-device because of technical limitations, not because openness was omitted on purpose by the manufacturer.
Xale - Friday, April 6, 2012 - link
Humerously, those aren't even Android features, but Feature Phone (Dumbphone) features.Stuff that could be done a decade ago.
TGressus - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link
why indeed?It seems like a more powerful tablet experience would serve folks better. Then the phone can go back to being a sleek and inexpensive afterthought.
What it's going to take to get there is a better tablet OS. MS is poised to bring it first, which I don't think many saw coming.
tipoo - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
Its almost funny how close to Windows vs OSX vs Linux this has become. Android gives you by a landslide the most options, iOS has a great user experience but cages advanced users in a bit too much, WP7 is somewhere in the middle on both fronts.WP7 seems to trade off absolute speed for smoothness. Looking at the browser synthetic benchmarks its much slower than even old single core Android or iOS phones, but what reviews can't show you is how well it lets you navigate pages during that loading time.
Braumin - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
Actually they don't show load times, every site on the earth focuses on javascript as the be all and end all for web browsing.