NokiaLumia 820 SIM-Free Smartphone - Black (Windows)

The phone is brilliant - clear screen, superb camera and excellent software. In particular, the Satnav app is better than anything else I've tried. It's a hefty piece of phone, and the case back is a little slippery, so it will take getting used to. In all other respects, the phone is superb.BUT - I ordered it a week ago, at £237, and already it's dropped to £199. Either play roulette with the prices, or bite the bullet and put up with price fluctuations! I'd be prepared to accept a fluctuation of a few pounds, but £38 is hard to stomach!UPDATE: I've been using the phone for a bit now, and I'm getting to know what it can do. I had a N97 Mini until the phone stopped holding a charge, and the difference from the creaky Symbian OS is considerable!Many people complain about the lack of "apps" for the WP8. I have to say that there isn't anything that I could have on an iPhone that I can't have on the Lumia, and several of the Nokia exclusives are brilliant, and there isn't an equivalent on the other platforms! Cinemagraph is great fun (adds little animated sections to a photo - the pictures are a bit like the ones in the Daily Prophet, with little sections of movement!), and the Nokia Satnav is the best I've tried. I've added my usuals, including Evernote, FB and Twitter and so on.The Camera is excellent, and the apps that support it (especially Smart Shoot) are brilliant. The screen is very clear and the colours are vivid. I haven't printed a photo to compare it with my Oly DSLR... but they look great on my laptop. The photos automatically back up to my Skydrive when I get to a wifi connection.Battery life is much better than I have been used to. After a day's moderate use (including the phone automatically checking my emails every 15 minutes), there is still some charge to go.The constant movement on the homescreen is fascinating, and careful arranging of the tiles makes the phone seem alive. It is quite mesmerising! Nothing is laggy or slow, and the OS is very simple to understand and use. I can't understand why the reviews are so against WP8.So- only one problem so far, and that is that none of my Nokia car mounts fit! The only official car mount for the 820 is the wireless charging one for £60.

A day or so after delivery the camera stopped working, I was unable to take stills or video. I did a battery pull soft reset and the camera started working again. Now, after entering a load of data and other details into the phone, the camera button stopped working again, and this time, soft reset does not rectify the situation. I say the camera button, because a downloaded app called 1shot allows taking a photo by tapping the screen, and this works. However, it is still not possible to take videos. there is too much personal stuff in the phone for a hard reset, and it appears other owners who experienced the same camera fault failed to rectify it by a hard reset.As a smart phone the device seems all it claims, but as the camera is a significant part of the selling point of mobile phones, the repeated camera failures is not good enough, so it only gets three stars.

I bought this phone as a temporary replacement for my recently broken Galaxy S3. I'd always been curious about Windows Phone and figured this would be the perfect opportunity to try it, while I waited for a new Android phone to come out that I wanted to buy.Once I received the phone, I loaded it up and got used to WP8's way of working (as opposed to Android's), I really started to enjoy it. So much so, that instead of waiting for a new Android, I went on to invest further with Windows Phone by buying a Lumia 1020. Giving the 820 to my Mum who, so far, seems to be enjoying it, too.The 820 is a little heavier than most modern phones, but it feels solid unlike the thinner lighter phones that are out there (iPhone/Galaxy S-series, which can feel like toys).It has a decent camera on it, which produces nice photos in good light (with a bright flash for low-light situations).The OS is smooth and runs well with the phone. While the tile look isn't to everyone's taste, I've always felt it had a nice look to it and enjoy the customisation it can bring.Coming from Android, I was worried about the apps that might be available (or not, as the case may be) but I was pleasantly surprised to find that all the apps I used regularly were there (twitter, instagram, facebook, vine, iplayer, netflix, my banking apps, etc - if there's not an official app there tends to be a third party one that'll do the exact same job or, in some cases, an even better one.The only thing that could potentially let the phone down is the battery. On regular use, the 'time remaining' sometimes stated as little as 6 hours (from a full charge). However, with the 'battery saver' feature (which cuts out all background activity) that time more than doubled. While this feature does cut out push notifications, you can still go into an app and refresh manually with little effect to the battery.Overall, if you're looking for a cheaper entry into the Lumia family, I'd definitely recommend giving this phone a purchase.