Got a Lumia 920: My thoughts after 48hrs


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UPDATE: I'm having battery drain problems. My wife also has a 920. Charged them both to 100%, mirrored settings/apps on each and left them on over night (screen off). As of this morning, her phone has 96% battery left and mine was @ 71%, so its not my imagination.The day before, it ****ed away nearly half its charge in 10hrs being on standby with no use at all. Phone won't make it through half a day if I actually used it at this point.

Also, Her phone also has the following apps enabled:

Screen brightness = Auto

Tap/Send =on

Nokia Drive background tasks = on

Wi-Fi =on

4G-LTE (can't be disabled on At&t)

location =on

Weather Channel background tasks = on

*Mine has an XBL account, but I've already tried disabling its connection and it makes no difference in battery life.

I've been told to let the phone die, then charge to max, turn off all background tasks, disable Nokia Drive etc. and while I appreciate everyone's help, I believe these tips are simply myths. Basically whats being suggested is to increase battery life by disabling every feature of the phone and don't use it. The more likely scenario here is that a certain number of phones have shipped with faulty batteries. I'm going to swap mine out for another 920 tomorrow if I come home today and see the phones eaten through its battery again. It was on 65% @ 6am when I left, so we'll see....

One thing that I can tell which will increase the battery life is to turn off NFC. Since NFC usage is basically non-existant here in the states, why leave it on if you are not going to use it.

One thing that I can tell which will increase the battery life is to turn off NFC. Since NFC usage is basically non-existant here in the states, why leave it on if you are not going to use it.

I understand what you're saying but again, wife has same phone with same settings is getting dramatically better life with all this stuff enabled. I disable everything and can't even get close to what she's getting with all the battery sapping stuff on.

One thing that I can tell which will increase the battery life is to turn off NFC. Since NFC usage is basically non-existant here in the states, why leave it on if you are not going to use it.

If NFC is an issue, it is an issue with the phone and software/hardware. On my S3, I have always had NFC turned on so me and my girl can easily share what we want between our S3's, and my battery , even on heavy use, last at least 15 hours.

I understand what you're saying but again, wife has same phone with same settings is getting dramatically better life with all this stuff enabled. I disable everything and can't even get close to what she's getting with all the battery sapping stuff on.

Maybe it is a bad battery.

I understand what you're saying but again, wife has same phone with same settings is getting dramatically better life with all this stuff enabled. I disable everything and can't even get close to what she's getting with all the battery sapping stuff on.

Then if you aren't happy with it...take it back to the store. But quit your complaining. It seems that no amount of tweaking on the phone is going to get a better battery life and no amount of anything is going to make you happy. It may be that this phone is defective....cause that never happens with the iPhone or any droid phone. Just my $0.02 opinion.

If NFC is an issue, it is an issue with the phone and software/hardware. On my S3, I have always had NFC turned on so me and my girl can easily share what we want between our S3's, and my battery , even on heavy use, last at least 15 hours.

Maybe it is a bad battery.

It's already known that there are some software bugs in WP8 on the 920....hell read the forums over at wpcentral. That is what apollo+ or whatever it is called is hopefully going to fix.

But as mentioned, my wife has the exact same phone with all that crap enabled and she's not having any problems with battery drain.

Have both your phones received the latest updates from Nokia? In particular, have you received the network+ update as there have been reports that that fixes the battery life issue.

I received my Lumia 920 on Saturday, it received all the latest updates on Sunday and I'm very happy with the battery life. It's not scientific but I estimate that the battery is lasting about 30% longer than my old Omnia 7.

Have both your phones received the latest updates from Nokia? In particular, have you received the network+ update as there have been reports that that fixes the battery life issue.

I received my Lumia 920 on Saturday, it received all the latest updates on Sunday and I'm very happy with the battery life. It's not scientific but I estimate that the battery is lasting about 30% longer than my old Omnia 7.

I got some updates to various Nokia apps the day I got it, but nothing since. Manually checked for updates and it says everything is up to date. How can you tell if the update has been applied? Are you on At&t?

Then if you aren't happy with it...take it back to the store. But quit your complaining. It seems that no amount of tweaking on the phone is going to get a better battery life and no amount of anything is going to make you happy. It may be that this phone is defective....cause that never happens with the iPhone or any droid phone. Just my $0.02 opinion.

It's already known that there are some software bugs in WP8 on the 920....hell read the forums over at wpcentral. That is what apollo+ or whatever it is called is hopefully going to fix.

Its not so much complaining as it is sharing of info on things I've tried and yes, I'm aware defective hardware comes from all vendors. I've pretty much accepted that the phones's going back. Just for the hell of it though, I've disabled everything and I mean everything and its now a dumbphone. Going to make a call and see how much the battery drops.

Disabling everything produced some good results. Only a 7% reduction in charge over night. Enabled Wi-Fi only and will see what that does to it while I'm @ work. I'll keep enabling things one at a time till I find the culprit and report back.

I can't be sure, but my mate gets LTE on his, and it lasts him from something like 6am - 7pm with regular use.

I think people expect too much out of phone batteries, I still see comments on here of people wanting more than 24 hours of life out of one charge. Ridiculous expectations are always going to end in disappointment.

1. Battery life so far, sucks: Nokia's battery performance usually improves after several recharges.

2. Speakers are not loud enough: You always have headphones, or buy a good pair! :p

3. No SD card slot or removable battery: You knew that before buying it, so doesn't count! :p

4. Windows app store: Well, it will take time, and it's already improving. Hope for the best! :)

I can't be sure, but my mate gets LTE on his, and it lasts him from something like 6am - 7pm with regular use.

I think people expect too much out of phone batteries, I still see comments on here of people wanting more than 24 hours of life out of one charge. Ridiculous expectations are always going to end in disappointment.

Yeah, I'm not expecting anything unrealistic. just acceptable. In its current state, there is no way this thing is getting me through a work day without a mid day top off. At least the time I have to wait to swap it out is giving a chance to troubleshoot/experiment. Hopefully, I'll be able to isolate whats killing the battery. Maybe I won't have to return the phone. Decided to swap for same phone due to it having Office built-in and I do like WP8.

1. Battery life so far, sucks: Nokia's battery performance usually improves after several recharges.

2. Speakers are not loud enough: You always have headphones, or buy a good pair! :p

3. No SD card slot or removable battery: You knew that before buying it, so doesn't count! :p

4. Windows app store: Well, it will take time, and it's already improving. Hope for the best! :)

5. Nokia screwed up stock levels and no one can get their hands on a phone: Yeah, it's pathetic.

The non-removable battery and terrible battery life are the main reason I'll pass on the Lumia 920, with the weight being a concern

the weight being a concern? I am a Professional IT person and we are for the most part not your most active people exercise (normally) wise. Yet I find it nowhere near heavy, even carrying it ALL day long. I feel it has a solid quality to it and I know I have it in my hand or pocket. But its lighter then my coffee cup for or not. Its lighter then my 2l bottles of soda, and its def lighter than any steak I normally eat.

I agree that I wish I could remove the battery, but who needs an SD card I have skydrive 25 gigs on it, I can stream my (almost) my entire music library with nokia music and xbox music. I can store all the docs I need now on the device and the rest in the cloud. Plus the 920 lets you use it like USB MassStorage for the library too. FM radio support is being talked about being put back in and TuneIn radio is pretty awesome. (use tunein and bought on android and WP)

I have a toshiba thrive (2), a samsung galaxy s1 and s2, HTC one XL, HTC HD2, iPhone 4, Nexus 7, and more. The Note 2 is heavier then the nokia 920 at least how it felt in my hand. The Galaxy s3 is nice but I hate "the application is not responding, would you like to wait, close, report" that I get on even my stock JellyBean devices.

As a phone its the best "smartphone" I have ever held in my hand (as a phone). As a Smartphone as much as the apps ... the best as well. The battery and heat disappointed however, there is supposed to be software patches coming out to fix them. As a CameraPhone absolutely the best I have ever seen by far (never tried the original pureview). Nokia Drive beats Iphone 5 on navigation (I hear they are talking about using nokias maps anyway), and Goggle Navigation at least in looks comes no where near the feel of Nokia Drive. I feel google's navigation a tiny bit more accurate in some tests I have done but Nokia's offline maps for me are easier to use when there is no data connection.

they also say that the Windows App store is empty as far as good, useful apps is concerned (but that is not Nokia's fault).

True not Nokia?s fault yet I find lots of good useful apps, as well as many entertaining. If you are around little kids or GFs/significant other that want to use your phone KidsCorner is awesome to let them play with it and not mess up your phones settings (nor read private emails or texts for that matter).Yet it allows them to have any songs you want them to listen to and what apps you want them to have access to.

Most battery driven devices get better after a week or 2 of charge cycles...

I find a lot of phones have poor in call volume performance, any one have a phone that has good-great call volume?

I have a Samsung Galaxy S3 and I can listen to an audio book with the phone in my shirt pocket

the weight being a concern? I am a Professional IT person and we are for the most part not your most active people exercise (normally) wise. Yet I find it nowhere near heavy, even carrying it ALL day long. I feel it has a solid quality to it and I know I have it in my hand or pocket. But its lighter then my coffee cup for or not. Its lighter then my 2l bottles of soda, and its def lighter than any steak I normally eat.

It's all relative - you can have a pen that feels too heavy but it would still obviously be very light in comparison to most other objects. All I know is that the weight was mentioned in most reviews and I don't like phones that weigh down my trousers. It's not a deal breaker but I can see it being annoying.

Walmart called and said they got some more in, so I exchanged the phone last night. Other than email/contacts, I will leave all settings stock and report back its battery usage. I did notice that Nokia drive is not a beta version on this phone. Dd anyone else get updated to release version?

It's all relative - you can have a pen that feels too heavy but it would still obviously be very light in comparison to most other objects. All I know is that the weight was mentioned in most reviews and I don't like phones that weigh down my trousers. It's not a deal breaker but I can see it being annoying.

I can assure you that it doesn't weigh down your trousers and doesn't feel heavy in actual use. The reviewers are looking for things to complain about and blowing the weight thing out of proportion. The Lumia 920 weighs about the same as an iPhone with its required protective case.

Walmart called and said they got some more in, so I exchanged the phone last night. Other than email/contacts, I will leave all settings stock and report back its battery usage. I did notice that Nokia drive is not a beta version on this phone. Dd anyone else get updated to release version?

Interesting. It looks like the update just came out and includes battery improvements:

http://forums.wpcentral.com/nokia-lumia-920/208300-nokia-drive-beta-updated.html

By the way, if you're impatient and haven't got them yet, you can download all the updates from Nokia using the QR codes here (note that you will have to log in to see the codes):

http://forums.wpcentral.com/nokia-lumia-920/208256-more-qr-code-nokia-updates.html

The network+ update is rumoured to have fixed the battery issue for a lot of people.

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SPC for NAS (TOS 7) is basically the same principle as UAC in Windows; it blocks executables from being launched by non-Super Users. After reaching out to my contact about these issues, I received the following response: Anyway, this only became clear when I closed the OpenClaw app screen and clicked on the OpenClaw icon in the taskbar; that is when I saw the message about disabling SPC. I think, due to the fact that this is a requirement, this should be a prompt during the installation process, not when closing the App Market and then trying to launch OpenClaw. There's also no 'Getting started' guide for people like me who have never used OpenClaw. I tried to add an LLM and discovered the tutorial led nowhere. That's when I started looking around the official TerraMaster forums, and I found a guide that helpfully explains that you won't get anywhere with OpenClaw unless you have a paid plan, which is disappointing because I imagined there would be an option to use a local LLM as I do in SubtitleEdit with Whisper-XXL. In addition, with the marketing imagery on the official site, it says that the OpenClaw feature is "all processed 100% locally for absolute privacy." which led me to believe that I could install a local LLM, not one that required paid tokens. In any case, TerraMaster does not provide guidance for this new feature, which was also a selling point of the F4-425 Pro! My contact also provided clarification about the above points I raised with TerraMaster Since it is not in the scope of the review to add paid services, I'll leave that to the people who are more qualified with OpenClaw. F4-425 Pro Surveillance App TOS also comes with a Surveillance app, which is not installed by default; it can be found in the App Market recommended section. In addition, after installing, it doesn't drop a shortcut on the Desktop or top taskbar, but you can "Send to Desktop" from the App Market listing for the app for a quick way to open it. Adding my Reolink POE doorbell camera was painless. TerraMaster doesn't appear to have a repository of preconfigured cameras; instead, the camera must be added using ONVIF or RTSP. No mobile Surveillance app TerraMaster still doesn't have a dedicated Surveillance app, although from searching online, Surveillance can be used and managed through the TNAS mobile app. I tried this with the updated TNAS mobile app beta in combination with TOS 7 and got a message that Surveillance was "Only accessible through web browser," so I reckon this must be limited to the stable versions of TOS 6 and the mobile app. More quirks In addition, whenever I minimized the Live View window in the browser Surveillance app, the feed appeared to switch to the Low-bandwidth stream, and there was no way to get the High-quality stream back. To get the High-quality stream back, I had to close Live View and then reopen it. Benchmarking A pretty cool feature of the TOS 7 is that it allows you to install directly to the NVMe M.2 SSD. In order to do that, you would have to leave out any HDDs during initialization, and even then, the system partitions are always written to two HDDs when they are eventually added. With three NVMe slots, this also gives an interesting scenario where you could build a TRAID storage Pool for installing all your apps and Docker on, and keep the third for SSD cache on the HDD pool. Limitless options! SATA PCIe 3.0 X1 A CrystalDiskMark test on a mapped network drive from within a Windows 11 25H2 PC (image above) connected over a 5 GbE hub was well within acceptable ranges. Although the read result on SATA was a little less than with the F4-425 Plus, for some reason, while writes were generally better. SATA PCIe 3.0 X1 I also ran the NAS Performance tester, which tests the link speed performance. As you can see, it pretty much maxes out the 5GbE connection. Of course, you can also opt to bond the two 5 GbE connections for a bit more umph, but I didn't do that. TOS 7, which, as of testing, is still in Beta, comes with an App Center that has a bunch of handy programs you can install right off the bat, such as Emby, Plex, Docker, as well as in-house Backup and Surveillance solutions. As you can imagine, any media streaming services you would want to host off the F4-425 Pro will work great, thanks to the Intel Core N350 CPU and its 16 GB of DDR5 memory. Accessing from mobile is only possible if Security Isolation Mode is disabled, which can put your NAS at risk from external sources, so there was no way to access it from the TNAS Mobile app. It's also quiet. I had this sat next to my computer on my work desk for the past week, and I did wonder if the noise I was accustomed to with NAS devices would annoy me, but all I could hear was a soft whirring of the rear fan (which was a little annoying) when the disks were not actively copying or reading data. Conclusion So what have I learned? Unfortunately, this release raises a few important questions and concerns that I feel haven't been adequately addressed. What I didn't like Our variant shipped with TOS 7 beta, and it's advised not to use it in a production environment. I feel that's a bit limiting on an $800 device. The mobile app is also still in beta and does not support some of the first-party apps, like Surveillance, and it still has quite a few bugs. I am a bit confused about the OpenClaw marketing along with the F4-425 Pro. I feel like that if it's going to be a main selling point, then offer official guidance on how to get started with it. TerraMaster recommends enabling SPC, but then markets the NAS for use with OpenClaw, which requires disabling SPC to be able to use it, opening up genuine security concerns for the NAS; and that's before you get into the security concerns of OpenClaw itself. Of course, the above issues won't be a problem if you decide to install something else on it, or even go back to the stable TOS 6. I wish TerraMaster had just given TOS 7 as opt-in rather than shipping with it. TOS 7 has been available as a preview since December 2025 (so well before my last TerraMaster review), and according to a thread on Reddit where a user shared a screenshot from the TerraMaster Facebook page, it is scheduled to launch today, June 23, but there's nothing about that in the TerraMaster news blog. My contact confirmed over email that TOS 7 exits beta today. The rubber feet also deserve a mention as they continue to be a problem, with them coming unstuck the moment you shift the F4-425 Pro anywhere on your desk. What I liked What it comes down to, though, aside from what I already mentioned, you are still getting a quality, affordable device here, so recommending it will depend on the individual's use case. If you're just looking for a relatively small NAS device to manage virtual machines on, backup your files, and take care of your home theater streaming, then it is a great device that will certainly futureproof you for some time. It provides good performance, takes up little space, and is, on the whole, very quiet. Four bays afford proper redundancy using TRAID or RAID 5, and you can even expand on storage capacity by adding the 2-bay D5, or 4-bay D8 Hybrid DAS over a USB 3.2 (10Gbps) link. Considering the 2024 releases were more about power, with the likes of an Intel Core i5-1235U high-end laptop CPU under the hood, I asked my contact last time if we could expect more of the same in higher-end models and was told: It makes a lot of sense to use Intel's N350 chip inside a NAS; it is more than capable of doing what the F4-425 Pro is intended for, media streaming and backup. The only downside is still the clear lack of community and even staff support on the official forums. In the past, I have had topics go unanswered for days, or there would be generic-type "we've noted this and passed it onto our developer team" type responses. Along with the other things I mentioned, it all ends up costing it a couple of points. If you are comfortable with the command line, Docker, and setting up TrueNAS or Unraid, you'll be fine. You can do great things with this hardware. In TOS, the apps are a bit lacking, and things don't always work as expected.\ AI NAS?! What has become clear to me this year is that we are going to start seeing all kinds of "AI NAS" come to market, and while that might be good for us consumers, be diligent and research these claims. Although the F4-425 Pro technically comes with AI, it is really using a cloud service that is externally sourced off-device through the third party OpenClaw app. My colleague did review a newcomer to the NAS space earlier this year, and it includes a local AI assistant inside the Zettlab D4 NAS, and they do not even use AI in the product name, check out Chris' review here. Where to buy and a discount coupon However, it does not change the fact that this is truly a great entry-level home media-class NAS that you can buy right now. TerraMaster is having a 20% off launch discount, plus you can also still apply our unique 10% off coupon on checkout, which only works on the official website. So here is a breakdown of the pricing that is only valid on the official TerraMaster website. TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N350) + 20% discount + 10% coupon = $575.99 TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N305) + 20% discount + 10% coupon = $503.99 TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N350) + 20% discount + 10% coupon = £525.59 TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N305) + 20% discount + 10% coupon = £460.79 Use NEOWIN coupon code during checkout for 10% discount Over on Amazon US and UK, the F4-425 Pro also gets a 20% launch discount, but here, the above 10% coupon cannot be applied. TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N350) for $639.99 at Amazon US (was $799.99) TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N305) for $559.99 at Amazon US (was $699.99) TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N350) for £583.99 at Amazon UK (was £729.99) TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N305) for £511.99 at Amazon UK (was £639.99) As an Amazon Associate, when you purchase through links on our site, we earn from qualifying purchases.
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