HTC 8S Windows Phone Is Much Cheaper Than Nokia 820 For Your Best Choice

The HTC 8S that Windows Phone 8S by HTC to give its full perfume-inspired name is out now for £180 (plus top-up) on spend as you go from 3, and on pre-order from Expansys at £240 SIM-free. So if you are searching for a less expensive way to hook up with Windows Phone 8 and its cheery live-time life-style than Nokia’s pricey Lumias, HTC is your best choice.

That is at least £150 much less than by far the most comparable Nokia, the £360 Lumia 820. We haven’t reviewed the 8S but, so I cannot say specifically how they stack up, but let’s have an appeal from what you get on paper.

The 8S features a slightly smaller screen than the 820 — four inches versus four.3 inches — but the resolution is exactly the exact same, 480×800 pixels. That is not great (the 4.7-inch Nexus four, only £20 a lot more, has 768×1,280 pixels) nevertheless it does mean the 8S features a couple of additional pixels per inch than the 820. So in theory it’ll be slightly sharper. The 820 has 217 pixels per inch, whereas the 8S has 233 (the Nexus 4 has a staggering 317).

Leaving the Android-toting Nexus 4 to 1 side, the 8S lacks Nokia’s exclusive apps and services. They are Nokia Drive, a turn-by-turn sat-nav app; Nokia CityLens, which overlays useful neighborhood information in your camera display; and Nokia Music, which streams tunes totally free. All are nicely made and important, and make up somewhat for your lack of fantastic apps on Windows Marketplace, but none are indispensable.

The actual difference in between the two phones is invisible: the components inside. The 820 has substantially far more effective chips, such as a 1.5GHz dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM, in comparison with the 8S’s slower 1GHz chip and pathetic 512MB of RAM.

No matter if you will notice any distinction is hard to say without making use of the 8S extensively and running benchmarks. But Windows Phone’s transitions — the animations that move you from a single screen towards the next — run at a fixed pace. In theory, you are going to only notice overall performance on games and also other testing apps, of which you can find few within the marketplace idea now.

Elsewhere, each takes microSD card to expand your storage as much as 64GB. The Nokia’s 8-megapixel camera trounces the HTC’s 5-megapixel work on paper no less than, and I would not be shocked for your distinction to become marked in their photos. We discovered the 820′s camera quite fantastic for what you’re paying.

Compare phones on contract, pay as you go and SIM-free on our mobile offers section — you are going to obtain the HTC 8S and Nokia Lumia 820 at those links. Which of those Windows Phones floats your boat? Would you take a punt on either of them? Let me know down inside the comments.