NOKIA LUMIA 820: THE LAST OF 3 FIRST IMPRESSIONS

The first phase of my phone fiddling is finished. Thank goodness. It's like anything you love, you think you could never have too much of a good thing, but perhaps attempting to set up 3 different phones over 6 weeks was a little ambitious.

I'm not paid to do this. I'm not the editor of a smart phone magazine. It's quite possible I have no idea what I'm talking about. I'm just a guy who gets up in the middle of the night to play stuff on the radio. Maybe I should be reviewing radio shows instead. What I've been trying to do is demystify the world of iPhone alternatives because a lot of the stuff written about Androids and Windows Phones is of a somewhat nerdy, techno-jargon bent.

I'm no professional techno-nerd... I just wannabe.

So I didn't start a smart phone magazine, I started this blog instead.

Here's my third and final offering for now, the very tidy Nokia Lumia 820...

Now I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "I'm sure I've seen this phone somewhere before." Well, you have and you haven't. Yes, I reviewed the Lumia 920 just 3 weeks ago, and yes the two phones are similar. So although, initially I wasn't going to directly compare phones in these first 3 blogs, I've reconsidered. I've decided to make this more a battle-to-the death between Lumias and Galaxy SIII's than a polite scuffle between all three.

In saying that, there are quite a few differences between the Lumias 820 and 920, so I'll spend the rest of this ultimate first impression outlining exactly what those are.

The most obvious difference is the size, of course. The 820 passes my crucial pocket-fit test without any effort whatsoever. In fact, after the Lumia 920 and the Galxy S3, it was such a relief to have a phone that was still more or less the size of a phone, I couldn't stop slipping it in and out of my pocket. In. Out. In. Out. In. Out. Hours of fun just doing that.

In fact, "slipping" is quite an appropriate verb because I've found the 820 to be perhaps the slipperiest Lumia yet. The Lumia family have this amazing polycarbonate shell with beautiful rounded edges. It's very tough, very hard to scratch and, as it turns out, more slippery than a fresh-caught fish.

Because I'm a) a bloke, b) clumsy and c) an idiot, I usually sort myself a cover to keep my handset as protected as possible. I was really keen to get stuck into the Lumia 820 though, so I started using it without a cover on and obviously dropped it on the hard linoleum floor immediately. Twice.

Nokias are Nokias though, so I was relieved to see the 820 had taken its beatings without complaint and had kept on ticking. The reason I dropped it the second time was due to my attempts to insert the sim and SD cards. (The first time was just blokey, clumsy idiocy) Other Lumias I've used have just had a little pop-out compartment at the top of the handset for the sim, with no option to expand the storage via SD. (You know what I mean; those memory cards you bung in your camera only smaller. I wonder what the SD stands for... "Stupid Doofer"?)

The Lumia 820 has the SD option. In some ways this is great because you can insert as much storage as you need. In other ways it's annoying because it means there's not much storage to begin with. Anyway, the upshot is, for the first time Nokia let's you take the back off their phone... if you CAN. Unlike the Samsung Galaxy SIII, which has a back so easy to remove you've done it before you meant to, the Lumia 820 requires an intricate combination of pushing, bending and jamming your thumbnail in at just the right time to gain access to its privates.

You can see how a guy could work up a sweat and lose his grip on the thing. Oh, the battery flew out and skidded across the floor as well. That too seemed to suffer no ill effects. No harm done.

Previously I've mentioned an app on the Windows 8 Lumias called Transfer My Data. This is what I tried to use to get my contacts and settings from last year's Lumia 800 to the all new Lumia 920. Without success, because they wouldn't talk to each other via bluetooth. I figured the problem might be something to do with a Windows 7.5 phone trying to get it on with a Windows 8 one.

This time I was trying it with the 920 and the 820, both running the same operating system and sure enough, big Lumia made contact with little Lumia and identified some stuff to transfer. Actually, that's an overstatement. It transferred half my contacts and nothing else at all. Am I using this app in some wacky way? Not sure, although an update came through for it last night, so maybe now it's a bit more useful.

So yet again I was setting up a phone almost from scratch. How hard would it be to develop a program that transfers your apps, settings and accounts from your old phone to the new one? Too hard apparently. Luckily I am now an old hand at personalising a Windows handset and I reckon I probably broke several speed records this time round. As far as how it operates, in terms of apps, browsing and on-screen appearance, there is literally no difference between the 820 and the 920 other than the 920 having a bigger screen.

The camera is the same, (yes, there's a forward-facing camera on this one too) and the speed appears to be the same, although you may experience a minuscule delay accessing things stored on your SD card, depending on how whizzy it is. (That means, did you buy the cheapest card available or did you pay through the nose for something super-fast?) Because I've now used 2 phones using Windows 8 and only one on Android, I'm starting to discover some quite interesting little tricks and hazards which can greatly enhance or hinder your Lumia experience, but we'll get into those down the track.

Let me just conclude these 3 first impressions by admitting so far the Lumia 820 is easily my favourite. If I'm being totally honest, I thought it would be right from the start, that's why I left it till last. The 920 is equally nifty, but just way to big for me, and while I liked the Galaxy S3 about a million billion percent more than I thought I was going to, it's still too weird for me to feel totally comfortable with.

Yes, Round 1 goes to the Nokia Lumia 820, but it's early days and I think you might be surprised what else these phones can and can't do. Dum dum dah...