Editorials

With yesterday’s announcement of the Nokia Lumia 820 and 920 coming to AT&T, the word that caught our eye and yours was “exclusive”. Even Rogers is now in on the "exclusive" action. The term was applied to both Lumia devices, although as pointed out in our forums, the 820’s exclusiveness to AT&T was dropped from Nokia’s site later in the day. 

The tech’o’sphere has responded quite negatively to the news if only because the Lumia 920 has built up such demand that many people are cheering for its success. That success though depends on how many people can actually buy it, which in turn translates into carrier availability. If the Lumia 920 is only available on 1 of 4 major US carriers, well that’s certainly less people than had it been on two or three carriers. A pretty obvious impact.

Well  hello there, what's your number?

This morning as expected, AT&T formally announced the Nokia Lumia 820 and 920 are headed for the carrier “in November”. No pricing or exact release dates were given.

But there was a nice little surprise with the Lumia 920 reveal: it comes in Cyan.

Many people were shocked that when Nokia revealed the 920 that the prominent color was AWOL from the lineup. The only variations shown were yellow, red, white, matte grey and black and in fact, the Nokia website reflects that offering.

Cyan though had become the unofficial-official color of the Lumia series from Nokia and to have it missing from the 920 seemed like an odd omission. We pointed out earlier the influence of the color on Microsoft's own designs too.

Yesterday we revealed to you the current Windows Phone 8 SDK, giving you a brief tour of some of the new features. Nothing exactly new was revealed that had not already been discussed or leaked out previously, but it was still interesting to see it in action.

Today we were planning on a follow up video to catch up on some of the areas we missed and truth be told, there wasn’t anything earth shattering their either (though the new Office does look quite nice).

Unfortunately, black helicopters surrounded our headquarters here in New York and any plans for an immediate follow up have been placed on hold. And since we’re not in the business of ruining surprise parties for people, we’re okay with that...

Nokia shows off the Lumia 920 at the 2012 Photokina camera trade show

Nokia is busy making the rounds promoting the Lumia 920 Windows Phone and this past week they set up shop at the 2012 Photokina trade show. If you aren't familiar with Photokina it is the largest trade show for the photographic and imaging industries. The equivalent for smartphones would be the annual Consumer Electronics Show or Mobile World Congress.

Nokia jumped on the opportunity to set up shop at the Carl Zeiss booth at Photokina to show off the Pureview Cameras on both the Lumia 920 and Pureview 808. A demo box was set up, like we saw at the New York reception, to demo the low light performance of these cameras.  Nokia reps also demoed the image stabilization and how it improves video quality.

So the question that has been put to me by our Chief Editor is; which Windows Phone 8 will be my next? It's a very tough one to answer right now, even being privileged as I am to have seen a glimpse at the full offering I can expect at launch. However I don't want to just focus on the potential of devices in the future, Windows Phone offerings have been around for 2 years now, and we can learn a lot by assessing the previous generations.

Almost every person I know has owned an HTC device at one time or another, and it saddens me to say I can't share that. I very nearly bought the HD7 as my launch device until the Omnia 7 reviewed so well that it became the clear choice (personal opinion, sorry HD7 owners). Every HTC windows phone offering has also seemed very reliable, my father's HD7 serves him perfectly to this day, whilst my Omnia 7 had an annoying audio stutter bug for the first year of it's life. 

The Seattle Times interviewed CEO Steve Ballmer recently and the man behind Microsoft is sounding quite confident about this year’s upcoming launches.

During the interview, Ballmer gave his impression of how momentous this year’s launch line-up will be for Microsoft and he even pulled out two Lumia 920 phones from his pockets. Many have speculated wildly on this interview in relation to Surface pricing, so we thought it was time we looked at what exactly was said…

My Next Windows Phone is.....

The Lumia 920 should be the phone of the year. Nokia has pushed innovation with their hardware design and their customer care. Nokia did not make any specific announcements about what carrier’s will get which phones. Which brings me to my problem. I do not want to switch to ATT because I can’t afford it. I am pretty positive that the Lumia 920 might be an ATT exclusive, no official announcements have been made.  

The Lumia 820, which is a great phone but doesn’t have the new Pure View camera. I like the 820 because I feel that a 4.3” screen is a perfect size for me personally, and the removable back covers are a nice touch.  I was hoping for a larger battery, but 1650mAH is pretty good and the screen isn’t as good as the 920 but still pretty classy.

Google is getting bold, telling OEMs 'no' on other OSs

Update: Google's Andy Rubin finally responds. See after the break...

A bit of a controversy is slowly erupting over Acer’s widely publicized plan to use the Aliyun OS in a new line of low-cost smartphones, mostly destined for the Chinese market. Aliyun OS is a Linux-based system developed by the Chinese company Alibaba Group and offered a way for OEMs like Acer to diversify.

Acer has now abruptly canceled plans after Google “expressed concerns” over the announcement.  Though Acer still wants to use the Aliyun OS, the move by Google is being interpreted as a hostile action to block competition. Reportedly Google threatened to cancel Acer’s license to make Android devices, which many consider playing hardball.

The question is, how far is Google willing to go to maintain dominance?

Did Apple's announcement help Nokia buy time?

Just over one week ago as Nokia took to the stage to announce their new Windows Phone 8 devices, their stock value dropped 16% in a single day upon the news. To many of us, this was confusing if only because the devices themselves really seemed great—but the problem was (and still is) the uncertainty created by not announcing price and availability.

We had an excellent analysis of the situation by our own Chris Umiastowski and noted how this was probably temporary and not warranted.

Since that time, Nokia’s stock has slowly climbed back up but there was another hurdle in the distance: Apple’s iPhone 5 announcement. The anticipation was if Apple announced something truly groundbreaking—revolutionary instead of evolutionary—it would further damage perception of Nokia to investors. The iPhone 5 is already one of the top selling phones in the world and it just got way better? That’s bad if you’re betting on Nokia.