Nokia Lumia 928 vs Apple iPhone 5
Smartphones are surpassing the commodity title and becoming life partners nowadays. I tend to remember those good old days when the early smartphones were marketed as PDAs or Personal Digital Assistants. Although that doesn’t happen today, even a mediocre smartphone can ace what was on offer with a PDA. That shows how much the time has evolved. In fact, the PDA market was dominated by Windows Compact Edition which was the mobile OS of Microsoft Windows and which used to be the only OS to facilitate the functionality of PDAs. It’s an irony that now the same OS lies on the 3rd position while much newer operating systems like Apple iOS and Google Android dominates the consumer markets. This happened because Windows took a long time to identify the market trends and change their design accordingly. To succeed in the smartphone market, you no longer have to change quickly, but also have to anticipate change which is broadly known as foresight. Today we are going to compare two handsets that are at the top of their respective markets. Nokia Lumia 928 is a sequel to Nokia Lumia 920 which is at the top of Windows Phone market while Apple iPhone 5 still stands as a giant in the iPhone market. We’ll compare them side by side to identify the differences in each of them.
Nokia Lumia 928 Review
Nokia Lumia 928 is more or less the same smartphone compared to Nokia Lumia 920. It seems that Nokia has slightly changed the appearance and rebranded the Lumia 920 because Verizon wanted an exclusive smartphone from Nokia. However, the first thing we noticed was that Lumia 928 doesn’t look as good as Lumia 920; which is not a good impression. That is not to say it’s a bad smartphone, but it’s somewhat thick compared to the new smartphones and feels heavy in your hand, which might be a problem for some. It sports a AMOLED capacitive touchscreen display featuring a resolution of 1280 x 768 pixels at a pixel density of 332 ppi. The Corning Gorilla Glass 2 reinforcement protects the screen from scratches and dents. As usual, Nokia offers PureMotion HD+ and ClearBlack display enhancements, providing you with a deep black that is pleasing to the eyes. Nokia Lumia 928 comes with a Micro Sim just like the Lumia 920.
Nokia Lumia 928 is powered by 1.5GHz Krait Dual Core processor on top of Qualcomm MSM8960 Snapdragon chipset along with Adreno 225 chipset and 1GB of RAM. As you can clearly see, this is not the top configurations in the game, but for a Windows Phone, these configurations are top tier. Since the Windows Phone 8 operating system is heavily optimized for this hardware, we do see a smoothly running smartphone over the set of tasks you want to get done.
Nokia offers 3G HSDPA connectivity as well as 4G LTE connectivity that ensures you can stay connected at all times. Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n enables you to surf over the available Wi-Fi hotspots and with DLNA you can stream rich media content to your big screens. You can also set up a Wi-Fi hotspot easily to share your super-fast internet connection.
Nokia Lumia 920 was renowned for superb low light photography, and Nokia has kept the same feature in Lumia 928, as well. It is one of the best smartphones for photography and offers a range of hardware and software enhancements to ensure that your experience in photography is enjoyable. The 8MP Carl Zeiss sensor is at the center with xenon flash and optical image stabilization. The sensor size is 1/3.2” and has 1.4µm pixel size along with PureView technology. It can capture 1080p HD videos at 30 frames per second with video stabilization and stereo sound. One can also use the 1.2MP front facing camera for video conferences, as well.
The internal storage of Lumia 928 stagnates at 32GB without the option to be expanded using a microSD card, but 32GB is fairly a comfortable amount of storage. Nokia Lumia 928 comes in Black or White and offers more than 11 hours of talk time with the 2000mAh non-removable battery pack.
Apple iPhone 5 Review
Apple iPhone 5 that was introduced in September 2012 is the successor for the prestigious Apple iPhone 4S. The phone is in the top shelf of the market since 21st of September 2012. iPhone 5 is one of the thinnest smartphone in the market scoring a thickness of 7.6mm, which is really cool. The handset scores dimensions of 123.8 x 58.5mm and 112g of weight which makes it lighter than most of the smartphones out there in the world. Apple has kept the width at the same pace while making it taller in order to let the customers hang on to the familiar width when they hold the handset in their palms. It is made entirely from glass and Aluminum which is great news for artistic consumers. No one would doubt the premium nature of this handset as Apple has tirelessly engineered even the smallest parts. The two tone back plate feels genuinely metallic and is pleasing to hold on to the handset. We particularly loved the Black model although Apple offers a White model, as well.
iPhone 5 uses an Apple A6 chipset along with Apple iOS 6 as the operating system. It will be powered by a 1GHz Dual Core processor that Apple has come up with for iPhone 5. This processor is said to have Apple’s own SoC using ARM v7 based instruction set. The cores are based on Cortex A7 architecture which was previously rumored to be of A15 architecture. It is to be noted that this is not the Vanilla Cortex A7, but rather an in-house modified version of Apple’s Cortex A7 probably fabricated by Samsung. Apple iPhone 5 being a LTE smartphone, we are bound to expect some deviation from the normal battery life. However, Apple has addressed that problem with the custom made Cortex A7 cores. As you can see, they haven’t increased the clock frequency at all, but instead, they have been successful in increasing the number of instructions executed per clock. Also, it was noticeable in the GeekBench benchmarks that the memory bandwidth has been significantly improved, as well. So all in all, now we have reason to believe that Tim Cook wasn’t exaggerating when he claimed that iPhone 5 is twice as faster as iPhone 4S. Apple also claimed that the GPU performance is as twice better compared to iPhone 4S. There may be several other possibilities for them to achieve this, but we have reason to believe that the GPU is PowerVR SGX 543MP3 with a slightly overclocked frequency compared to that of iPhone 4S. Apple has apparently moved the headphone port all the down to the bottom of the smartphone. If you have invested in iReady accessories, you may well have to buy a conversion unit because Apple has introduced a new port for this iPhone. The internal storage would come in three variations of 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB with no option to expand storage using microSD card.
Apple iPhone 5 has 4 inch LED backlit IPS TFT capacitive touchscreen featuring a resolution of 1136 x 640 pixels at a pixel density of 326ppi. It is said to have 44% better color saturation with full sRGB rendering enabled. The usual Corning gorilla glass coating is available making the display scratch resistant. Apple CEO Tim Cook claimed that this is the most advanced display panel in the world.
The iPhone 5 comes with 4G LTE connectivity as well as CDMA connectivity in different versions. The implications of this are subtle. Once you commit to a network provider and a specific version of Apple iPhone 5, there’s no going back. You can’t buy an AT&T model and then transfer the iPhone 5 to Verizon or Sprint’s network without buying another iPhone 5. So you will have to think rather carefully on what you want before committing to a handset. Apple boasts of an ultrafast Wi-Fi connectivity as well offering Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n dual band Wi-Fi Plus cellular adapter. Unfortunately, Apple iPhone 5 doesn’t feature NFC connectivity nor does it support wireless charging.
The camera is the regular 8MP with autofocus and LED flash that can capture 1080p HD videos @ 30 frames per second. It also has a front camera to make video calls. It is worthwhile to note that Apple iPhone 5 only supports nano SIM card. The new operating system seems to provide better capabilities than the old one as usual.
A Brief Comparison Between Nokia Lumia 928 and Apple iPhone 5
• Nokia Lumia 928 is powered by 1.5GHz Krait Dual Core processor on top of Qualcomm MSM 8960 Snapdragon chipset along with Adreno 225 GPU and 1GB of RAM while Apple iPhone 5 is powered by 1GHz Dual Core processor that is based on Cortex A7 architecture on top of Apple A6 chipset.
• Nokia Lumia 928 runs on Windows Phone 8 while Apple iPhone 5 runs on Apple iOS 6.
• Nokia Lumia 928 has 4.5 inches AMOLED capacitive touchscreen with PureMotion HD+ and ClearBlack display featuring a resolution of 1280 x 768 pixels at a pixel density of 332ppi while Apple iPhone 5 has 4 inch LED backlit IPS TFT capacitive touchscreen featuring a resolution of 1136 x 640 pixels at a pixel density of 326ppi.
• Nokia Lumia 928 has 8MP camera that is capable of extreme low light photography can capture 1080p HD videos @ 30 fps while Apple iPhone 5 has 8MP camera that can capture 1080p HD videos at 30 fps.
• Nokia Lumia 928 is bigger, thicker and heftier (133 x 68.9 mm / 10.1 mm / 162g) than Apple iPhone 5 (123.8 x 58.6mm / 7.6mm / 112g).
• Nokia Lumia 928 has 2000mAh battery while Apple iPhone 5 has 1440mAh battery.
Conclusion
It isn’t easy to compare two smartphone with different operating systems. The odds change considerably given these two smartphone operating systems doesn’t seem to share a point of origin. Windows Phone 8 has a sleek design with the metro style interface and live tiles while Apple iOS has a completely different approach towards their operating system. This makes the choice of the operating system heavily biased on personal opinion, and it’s difficult to give it an objective perspective. Hence we will not talk about the operating system and continue comparing the hardware components. Both smartphones are bound to offer performance of similar caliber given the similar processors used in each of them. However, Nokia Lumia 928 has a clear edge on the optics because it is one of the top end and renowned smartphones for low light photography. Apple iPhone also offers advanced optics, but not as much as Lumia 928. To compensate that, Apple iPhone has more than 8 times apps in their app store compared to Windows App store, and if you are a killer for apps, then iPhone may be a better choice for you. Our advice for you is to go to the retail shop and use the smartphone for a bit before making the purchasing decision. That way, you won’t regret the purchasing decision later on.