Lumia 822 Review

I have been using the Nokia Lumia 822 on Verizon Wireless for just over two months now. I like this phone. In fact I wrote the first sentence of this post on my desktop, and then sat down on the couch to type it on my phone. When I had my upgrade with Verizon around Christmas 2012, I knew that I wanted a Windows Phone. I had to decide between the HTC 8X and the Lumia 822. I went with the Lumia for several reasons, including the microSD card slot, the exclusive Nokia apps, and cost. The form factor for both devices isn't exactly my favorite. I really like how my original Droid Incredible and the iPhone have a very satisfying lock/power button on the top of the device. I have never owned the HTC 8X, but the lock button and squared design doesn't seem to quite fit in my hand the best. I have gotten used the side lock button on the Lumia. Other reviews have complained about the look and shape of the Lumia 822, but I like the rounded edges and it looks fine to me. I got the grey model. All of this is slightly irrelevant since I have always used an OtterBox on the phone. That was a big change for me and I don't really like the OtterBox but I have gotten used to it. The phone is already thicker than competing smartphones, and the OtterBox doubles it. I don't have any kind of protection policy on it and I can't afford to damage this phone so the Otterbox is staying put.

The screen is very good. It is not as high of resolution as my iPhone 4, but it is bigger and that's a trade off I will take. It would be nice to have the fancy resolution of the other phones but not really necessary to me. It gets the job done and you probably won't notice it during normal use.

The camera produces perfectly reasonable pictures for my purposes. All my recent smartphones have done that as well. I don't know that much about photography and I really couldn't tell you the difference between most smartphone camera pictures. The thing I dislike most about the camera is the rather absurdly long shutter lag. It really seems to take 1-2 full seconds to focus. My wife's Galaxy Note II takes pictures literally the instant she presses the software shutter button. Maybe I am doing something wrong or there is an app that can fix that. I don't know, but it is literally my only complaint about the phone.

Call quality and the speaker phone work fine. No one complains about hearing me. Data speeds are great on Verizon 4G LTE. I don't think I get quite the same speedtest.net results that I did with my Droid, but real world web browsing, uploading and downloading is indistinguishable from my Comcast WiFi.

Battery life is phenomenal. As I write this I have 53% left after 14 hours of moderate use and an hour or so of typing this. If I need to, I can get two days on the battery. Battery drain with the screen off and connected to WiFi is basically none. Even leaving the phone in my pocket at work connected to LTE it barley uses any battery.

I like having the Nokia apps. The maps are now available to all Windows Phones but I think Lumia still has exclusive on a few apps.

Having the microSD option is very nice as well. My podcasts actually used up most of the 16gb of internal storage and it was nice to pop in my 32GB SD card.

My phone is also factory unlocked. I popped an AT&T SIM card in it and texts and phone calls just worked. Data worked after changing one extremely simple APN. I didn't try MMS. If you go to settings and then chose extras+info it literally says SIM Unlock 1.0.05. However, there is an update for "extras+info" and I am afraid to run it because I don't want to lose my unlock. If you know about this, let me know on Twitter.

Overall, I am very happy with the Nokia Lumia 822.