Nokia announced the Lumia 720 on Monday Feb. 25 at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The phone represents part of the company's strategy to merge innovation with fashionable design while targeting younger, socially active consumers.
In terms of design, the Lumia 720 is exceptionally sleek and is the thinnest Lumia to date, being only 9m thick. It weighs 128 grams (4.5 ounces) and is the first to have curved glass at its set price level. It has a 4.3-inch LCD display with a ClearBlack filter that cuts down on outdoor glare and features easy-to-clean technology that should mitigate fingerprint problems.
Perhaps the phone's biggest strength is its innovative camera: it has a f/1.9 aperture, larger than most high-end smartphones available. This allows more light to come into the camera, making for clearer, crisper pictures. It includes the company's best front-facing camera: a popular tool for self-portraits or "selfies" and features a wide-angle lens for including others in your picture. The camera allows for great use of Skype as well as Nokia's digital camera lenses such as Cinemagraph and Smart Shoot. New apps include Place Tag, which adds location, date and time to the pictures you've taken. Glam Me allows for picture editing, so you can do things like whiten teeth and smooth skin tone. Nokia claims that the app was popular during consumer testing.
In terms of hardware, the 720 features a 1GHz dual-core Snapdragon chip and 512 MB of RAM, the same as the Lumia 520. This indicates that Nokia is going less for the high tech crowd with the device than a younger, social-networking audience.
While the 720 is certainly appealing, U.S. consumers will have to wait to get their hands on the device, at least for now. Right now Nokia only aims to launch the smartphone in Asia and parts of Europe. The phone will be available in five colors (cyan, black, yellow, red and glossy white) for a retail price of around $330.
