Windows Phone 8

Playing Angry Birds with a banana. (Image via @nokia)

A little faux controversy was brought up over the weekend about the Super Sensitive Touch display of the Lumia 920 with PureMotion HD+ (and 820). The concern was that with the phone in your pocket (or bag) jostling around, it might turn on and then start a vicious cycle of staying on since objects are making contact with the screen. Result? Battery drain.

Nokia has published an in-depth article over on its Conversations blog detailing how wireless charging works in its latest Lumia Windows Phones. Both the Lumia 820 (with compatible back plates) and Lumia 920 support wireless charging by simply resting on a compatible charging plate, Fatboy Pillow, or even a speaker such as the JBL PowerUp entertainment system.

Using Qi standards, Nokia is able to allow consumers make use of accessories to achieve impressive results. Gone will be the days of hunting through the mess of cables for the USB adapter, for then to locate a free socket and to then fiddle with the device to connect it to a mains or PC. But just how does wireless charging work?

We're almost at 4G - Lumia 920 promoted for EE

Orange UK has issued the September edition of its Orange Exchange email newsletter, which includes information on upcoming 4G hardware that will be launching on parent network EE (previously known as Everything Everywhere). We were at the EE launch event in London last month where the new network announced an array of 4G hardware including the Lumia 920 and Lumia 820.

We had already created a comparison guide for the higher end Windows 8 devices but many requested a complete guide that included the HTC 8S and Lumia 820.

The specs guide is not designed to be exhaustive but should cover the key differentiators between models. We have the visual guide for comparing the devices by size included below as well should make the decision of what to go for even easier. 

There's a new Flickr page dedicated to the Nokia Lumia 920 Windows Phone's camera.  Created by professional photographer Alex Efimoff, the page highlights photos taken with the Lumia 920's Pureview Camera.  The photos range from low light shots to macro shots take with the 920.

The images appear to be a collection of test shots taken by Nokia as well as images captured by Efimoff with the Lumia 920. The Flickr page also has an invitation to add your own photos and video clips taken with the Lumia 920.

Caught on camera

You know its "silly season" around these parts when we start to post spy pics of phones. Such is the case this afternoon as our sleuthing reader Peter V., sent us this photo of an apparent Lumia 920 taken this morning.

Now, the location won't be a shocker: Bellevue, Washington (specifically at Tulleys in Hyatt Regency). That means of course we're probably looking at someone with Microsoft who's dogfooding the OS and giving things a test run. Or maybe they're someone with a carrier who's in town to visit big ol' MS.  Who knows, we just know it's not us.

Either way  the 920 is coming within 3-6 weeks (by most estimates) and we're okay with building a little excitement for this phone and other Windows Phone 8 devices.

The Lumia 920 Windows Phone 8 smartphone is available to pre-order on eBay from highly recommended user never-msrp (99.5%). The listing is for the matte-black version and is set at $899.99 with a release date of "end of October", though the specified shipping date is October 1-15.

Downloadable Text suggestions in Windows Phone 8

Here is something we clearly missed yesterday but reader black_lion picked up. In the video we showed of some brave souls using forks (yes, the utensil kind) to navigate their Lumia 920s, a little notification popped up that raises some eyebrows: Text Suggestions.

The dialog simply states "You are missing text suggestions for this keyboard. You can download them now or visiting Settings > Keyboard to do this later."

The same crew at NokiaGang who brought the earlier video OIS test with the Lumia 920 have a short video showing off the matte-black version.  The video itself doesn't reveal too much, though we have seen less of the all-black variation of the 920 since Nokia seems to focus on yellow for most product shots.

Interestingly, the handler does get the privilege of magically swiping to the right to see the programs list. Shocker, it's the same as Windows Phone 7 though we do quickly see a Transfer my Data app in that list. The program is never launched and we're unsure if this is part of the cloud-backup solution for saving app data that we showed in the SDK video or if this is a Nokia app to further augment that service (e.g. from any other smartphone).

We're starting to see a new theme of video reviews this year: shaky video cam tests. Yes, with Nokia's Lumia 920 and their optical image stabilization (OIS), everyone will be comparing it to everything. The question is how crazy will the rigs and trials get?