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
Storage and Multimedia
Internal capacity is a little stingy at just 8GB. It's enough for a reasonable selection of apps, but once you start taking photos and loading movies, you need to make use of the micro SD slot. This allows you to boost storage by another 64GB.
As is often the case with Windows Phone handsets, supported media file types range extensively and you should have no trouble with WMVs in full HD.
Playback is smooth thanks to the well-optimised hardware and software and the screen ensures everything looks good. Audio quality is also excellent on the phone's loudspeaker meaning for video and music playback (as well as use as a speakerphone or for video calls) it's a capable handset. Be warned though as it's quite easily covered up with your hand by accident.
In terms of multimedia services the handset comes with Nokia Music pre-installed which is quite fun to use as a kind of genre radio station platform - you can stream mixes of particular genres and the service will queue a selection of tracks.
A limited number of these playlists can also be saved to your phone (for a set amount of time) and it's all free, though there is the option of paying for extra features. Microsoft's YouTube app is also loaded onto the handset and the latest version of this (which you can update to for free via the Windows Phone Store) is absolutely brilliant and easily as good as Google's official equivalent on Android.
The official Netflix app is also well worth a look if you have a subscription (as this is probably the best app from the streaming service on any platform so far. If you set up a VPN you can access the US catalogue of films, TV series and some exclusive shows, which is a positively vast selection to get your teeth into for around 5 a month.
Lastly there's Microsoft's collection of connected services from the Games app to the Windows Phone Store, to Xbox's Music + Videos and Xbox SmartGlass you've got a range of options for accessing linked content under a single account and even a couple of ways of interacting between content on your phone and content on a console-connected TV screen.
While the battery life is decent such multimedia duties are the sort of thing which will drain it the fastest, so although you can expect it to perform reasonably well in such a role it's not going last much longer than a day and probably less if you really push it hard.
In any case, as a multimedia device the Lumia 720 is easy to recommend.
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