More reviews coming in for the Nokia Lumia 928

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With the Nokia Lumia 928 only being released on Verizon in the USA and with the 'All About' sites being UK-based, you'll forgive us for not reviewing the Lumia 928 ourselves. Suffice it to say that it's a refined version of the Lumia 920 but with a Xenon flash. You'll want a lot more detail though, so we can recommend a few more third party reviews, linked below, with some quotes. See here for previous linked reviews.

Lumia 928

First up, here's Chris Ziegler (ex Engadget) writing over at The Verge:

But low-light performance aside, Nokia decided to beef up anyway by throwing in a xenon flash, a legitimate camera flash tube that can produce a very bright burst of light to help fill out a scene. It's a Nokia trademark — its highest-end camera phones have had xenon flashes for years, giving you considerably more power than you can with a single or dual LED. I found that I didn’t use it much, though. The 928 already puts an emphasis on low light performance, and the flash has a tendency to do strange things to white balance. If you’re taking an action shot at night, xenon is your best option, but otherwise you’re best off leaving it disabled and letting the sensor do its thing. Xenon can only flash — it can’t stay lit — so the 928 also keeps a white LED hanging around for additional illumination during video....

...There’s a sad truth to the 928: It’s a Lumia 920 with a slightly worse design, a dearth of snazzy color choices, and a xenon flash that I found myself not needing very often. Verizon needed a “flagship” Windows Phone from the platform’s flagship OEM, no question — it just would’ve been helpful to see it at the same time that AT&T got the 920. And it needed to look better than this.

Nokia also undercut the 928 by introducing the gorgeous Lumia 925 at the same time, which is thinner, trimmed in aluminum, and equipped with better camera optics

See here for the full review text.

Secondly, Mark Guim, from The Nokia Blog:

The Nokia Lumia 928 has an 8.7 megapixel camera with Pureview technology for better low light photos. The night photos are really amazing even without flash. Thanks to the Optical Image Stabilization on the Lumia 928, it can allow longer shutter time which brightens up the photo. A downside to this is that your subjects will appear blurry if they’re moving. To solve this, the Lumia 928 also features xenon flash. It’s brighter than the usual LED flash on most smartphones and is great at freezing your subjects in the photos.

Nokia Lumia 928 Camera

The daylight photos look okay, but I expected better. I prefer a little more contrast in my photos. There’s also one issue that I want to point out. The built-in photo gallery shows a lower quality photo than what is actually captured. Reviewers, bloggers, and users of this phone might complain that the photos appear soft, but that’s because the image quality is decreased by the gallery. To view the real high quality photos, download this application called HD Photo Viewer. It’s free and it does a better job of showing the real quality of the photos that you took. The difference is very noticeable...

....To summarize this review, I think the Nokia Lumia 928 is the best Windows Phone device out right now. It’s also currently the best Nokia Lumia. I said the same thing when I reviewed the Nokia Lumia 920, but the 928 has a few improvements. It improves on the camera flash with xenon flash. It is also available on a very reliable and fast Verizon LTE network.

If you’re an Android or iPhone user looking to switch, the Windows Phone 8 experience feels refreshing. Many of your favorite apps are also showing up in the Windows Phone store. The app selection may not be as big as Android or iPhone right now, but it is definitely getting better each day.

See here for the full review text. Mark also did a video version of his review, embedded below:

We've got a contact in the USA who will be providing us some first party photos and opinions in due course.