Nokia Lumia 720 review
The budget Windows Phone that still packs a punch.
A well designed and beautifully crafted smartphone, which packs a stunning camera for the price point. Windows Phone 8 is its Achilles heel, however. If you want a good smartphone with above average capabilities basics and don’t want to pay the earth this may well be it. If you’re hoping for an app-rich experience look to Android, BlackBerry and iOS.
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Excellent build quality and design; Brilliant camera; Display is sharp, bright and colourful
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App ecosystem lacklustre; No 4G
Performance and Battery
The Lumia 720's processor setup is the same as other Windows Phone 8 devices. A Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 dual-core chip clocked at 1GHz powers the device with 512MB of RAM and an Adreno 305 graphics processing unit (GPU).
Navigation, and screen transitions are similar to other Windows Phone devices. Overall performance for things like app load speeds and multitasking is a good - with no noticeable slowdown.
The battery pack is rated at 2,000mAh and is non-removable. For the most basic phone use this will last a couple of days with no problems. With more moderate-to-heavy workloads you're looking at a fairly typical lifespan of around a day to a day and a bit at a push, but generally we didn't find ourselves caught short too much with the Lumia 720.
Software
There have been no significant upgrades to the Windows Phone UI, since we reviewed the flagship devices such as the Lumia 920.
The tiled interface is bold, sharp and colourful while the Live Tiles themselves double up as both app shortcuts and widgets, pushing information and updates to the homescreen. The People Hub also does a good job of aggregating social networking, email, messaging and contacts in one place. Good, but not great mind you - it is far from perfect.
The most common criticism of Windows Phone 8 is its app ecosystem. It isn't on par with established competitors such as iOS and Android. This is our feeling on the subject too, but it's not because of the lack of app quantity, the most commonly cited reasoning, it is an issue of quality and consistency.
There are some gems tucked away in the Windows Marketplace, but there is also a lot of half-hearted, third-party fluff. iOS and Android also have their fair share of second rate apps too, but they have more quality apps to balance it out. Even the BlackBerry has worked hard to get high quality apps on its BB10 platform quickly.
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