Difference Between Nokia Lumia 900 and HTC Titan II

Nokia Lumia 900 vs HTC Titan II | Speed, Performance and Features Reviewed | Full Specs Compared
 

If you have been reading our comparisons at the CES 2012, you might have ended up thinking it is more of an Android festival than a Consumer Electronics Show. It’s going to change now with these additions of handsets from two reputed vendors in the smartphone arena. Both of these phones doesn’t run on Android, rather on the debut Windows Mobile 7.5 Mango edition. It certainly is a welcome surprise to have them in our altar to be compared. Nokia used to be the best mobile phone manufacturer in the world some time back, back when the trend of the mobile world transitioned from mobile phone to smartphone, Nokia lagged behind with their proprietary OS and their domination came to an end. Since then, Nokia has tried out various methods to regain what was duly theirs, but constantly failed. After the release of Windows Mobile 7.5 Mango, Nokia’s decision to manufacturer Windows phones has proven to be a worthy decision to regain their market it seems. So we are here with the successor of their debut Lumia 700.

On the other hand, we have HTC who has a sound brand loyalty in the smartphone arena. They are the largest smartphone suppliers to the United States as per last year records, and they have a portfolio of products consisting Android OS as well as Windows Mobile. As per our preliminary market analysis, HTC Titan II is released to compete with Nokia Lumia 900 and both of the handsets have grabbed a lot of attention at CES 2012. We think they would be the ideal companions to be compared against each other, to find out the differences in them.

Nokia Lumia 900

Nokia undoubtedly come up with state of the art mobile phones and what they lacked was a proper OS. Windows Mobile 7.5 Mango has given them a perfect platform to integrate their hardware with a cutting edge OS. Lumia 900 comes with 1.4GHz Scorpion processor on top of Qualcomm APQ8055 Snapdragon chipset with Adreno 205 GPU and 512MB of RAM. We would have loved Lumia 900 to have more RAM, but even in this set up, it would multi task seamlessly. The real bottleneck in multi-tasking comes when the user tends to use high-speed LTE connectivity to browse or stream from internet while making a routine call, and in that scenario, Lumia 900 may well lag behind in switching due to the performance issues in the RAM. But rest assured, this is only an extreme scenario and it’d hardly occur, so we can ignore that for the time being. Besides the LTE connectivity, Lumia 900 also has Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n for continuous connectivity.

Lumia 900 boasts 4.3 inches AMOLED Capacitive touchscreen featuring a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels at 217ppi pixel density. We have a good feeling about this screen, although it could have done more with a better resolution and pixel density. We suspect the text and image reproduction would be slightly blurry at the particle level, but then, average user won’t feel the difference. It has 16GB of internal storage without the option to expand the memory using a microSD card, and which may be a problem if you’re into keeping multimedia content with you. Nokia had the reputation for good cameras back in the golden days and 8MP camera in Lumia 900 continues the tradition. It has Carl Zeiss optics, autofocus and dual-LED flash with geo tagging while the camcorder can capture 720p HD videos @ 30 frames per second. The 1.3MP front camera can be used for video conferencing.

Nokia is fond of manufacturing multi colored mobile phones, but in this case, Lumia 900 only comes in Black and Cyan. It has square edges and fits into your hand perfectly scoring the dimensions of 127.8 x 68.5 x 11.5mm and a weight of 160g. Indeed, Lumia 900 is on the hefty side of the spectrum and might be somewhat uncomfortable to keep in hand for extended amounts of time. Nokia Lumia 900 boasts talk time of 7 hours with the 1830mAh battery.

HTC Titan II

HTC Titan is the predecessor of Titan II and HTC has come up with a better design for Titan II. It has curved smooth edges and feels good in your hand. Titan II has an expensive, elegant look with the piano black coating it comes in. It is somewhat thicker than Nokia Lumia 900 scoring a thickness of 13mm and slightly bigger too with 132 x 69mm in dimensions. Surprisingly Titan II is lighter than Lumia 900 with a weight of 147g. It has 4.7 inches S-LCD Capacitive touchscreen panel featuring a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels at a pixel density of 199ppi. As we’ve mentioned in Lumia 900, the reduction in pixel density may cause some blurring at the particle level, but without careful inspection, it’s difficult to differentiate.

Titan II is made up to last more, perform more and collaborate more. Its 1.5GHz scorpion processor on top of Qualcomm S2 Snapdragon chipset is a good mount of a machine. We currently have no information about Titan’s GPU or RAM, but we are expecting an Adreno 220 or PowerVR GPU along with 1GB of RAM which would only be fair for this amazing handset. This set of hardware is tightly coupled with Windows Mobile 7.5 Mango, to yield the due performance boost, and given this set up, we have no doubt that it’d seamlessly multi task and switch between processes even when you’re using the high-speed LTE connectivity. Besides LTE connectivity, Titan II also has Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n with DLNA that enables you to wirelessly stream rich media content to smart TVs.

What we call the pinnacle of HTC Titan is the camera features. The 16MP camera is a state of the art and the best camera so far in a smartphone. It has advanced functionalities for still captures like autofocus and dual-LED flash along with geo tagging, BSI sensor and image stabilization. We are somewhat disappointed in the camcorder since it only promises us to capture 720p HD videos @ 30 frames per second, whereas HTC could have easily upgraded it to capture 1080p HD videos. Titan II also has 1.3MP camera at the front for the use of video conferencing facilities. We gather Titan will have 1730mAh battery, but we don’t have exact information about battery life as of yet, but we can guess somewhere around 6-7 hours of battery life given the specs.

Conclusion

When you encounter an idealistic competition, it’s really difficult to make a choice on which dominates over which. It’s not a simple matter of determining who crossed the finish line first. There are no apparent winners like that in these races. Instead, we can list down the pros and cons for your reference, and that’s as far as objective judgment can go. As you have read and gathered, in terms of hardware, HTC Titan II is slightly better than Nokia Lumia 900. But because it’s only slightly better, the difference can only be seen with rigorous testing using computationally intensive applications. Thus, on the assumption that HTC Titan II will also have a 512MB RAM, we can conclude both of these handsets to be in the same caliber. However in terms of optics, HTC Titan II is the certain winner featuring the best still camera with 16MP and some additional advanced features along with it. Titan also has a better screen panel, but the pixel density is better in Nokia Lumia 900. That been said, the rest is how you perceive the handset. We have no information on the pricing schemes they are offered, so we are look forward to give you an update on that when we get the information.