Performance

The Nokia Lumia 925 features a tried-and-true Windows Phone chipset: the Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 MSM8960 with a one.5 GHz dual-core Krait CPU, Adreno 225 GPU and a dual-channel LPDDR2 retentiveness controller. It's non the latest generation of Qualcomm silicon, which has its disadvantages in graphics performance and free energy efficiency, only it still performs reasonably well when information technology comes down to it.

Windows Phone is an operating arrangement that relies heavily on graphics processing to deliver a smooth, 60 frames per second experience and during my time with the 925 I never experienced OS slowdowns despite the underpowered CPU compared to current-gen high-end Android devices. With 1 GB of RAM, multitasking is also reasonably fast, as I merely saw the dreaded "Resuming…" screen briefly when reloading applications.

Performing basic tasks in applications is also very fast on the MSM8960, including scrolling lists and panning. I only experienced very minor slowdowns in the camera app when attempting to access the settings, but usually Microsoft'due south efforts in optimizing the Bone take resulted in a polish, lag-free and quick operating system, especially on Windows Phone's top hardware. High-end phones similar the HTC Ane are probably a small footstep to a higher place the Lumia 925 in terms of app quickness, but by no means is the Lumia 925 a slouch.

In games the Lumia 925 with its Adreno 225 GPU provides necessary grunt to drive 3D rendering on the phone'south 1280 x 768 display. The Adreno 225 is currently the fastest GPU you lot can get on a Windows Phone, then games developed for the platform don't demand resources higher than what you can get on the 925.

I tested a few of the latest games on the Lumia 925, including Halo: Spartan Assault, and found no slowdowns or problems on the operation side. Some of the height-end games aren't of the same caliber equally available on Android or iOS, which take devices with more powerful GPUs, but Windows Phone has a decent range and Xbox integration is e'er a nice characteristic.

To compare the performance of the Lumia 925 to other smartphones on the market, I ran ii benchmarks: WPBench that tests CPU, GPU and retention against other Windows Phones, and Futuremark'due south Peacekeeper in-browser criterion.

The Lumia 925 performs as expected, which is exactly the same every bit other MSM8960 smartphones such every bit the Lumia 920 and Windows Phone 8X by HTC. It's around 25% faster than the lower-range Windows Phones that utilize the MSM8227 chipset, and slightly slower than the Lumia 820 which features a lower-resolution display with the same MSM8960 fleck as the 925.

Here the Lumia 925 falls well behind other smartphones in browser functioning, but it keeps itself in the cluster of other Windows Phones. Faster phones such as the HTC One, Samsung Galaxy S4 i9500 and Apple tree iPhone five gather a score of more than twice that of the 925, and in general browser usage they are faster with less checkerboarding. The scores seen in this benchmark are likely heavily affected by the browser each phone runs, and Internet Explorer 10 on the Lumia 925 isn't the best performer hither.

Bated from chipset performance, the connectivity options available on the Lumia 925 and their operation is not of any concern. I had no bug connecting the device to my 5 GHz 802.11n network, while both Blutetooth and A-GPS performance was strong. Mobile network operation was a little weaker than some other devices I tested recently, as data connections tended to drop in low-signal areas where the Galaxy S4 or HTC 1 wouldn't, but downstream and upstream speeds were both good.

1 of the more pressing issues relating to the Lumia 925 is its internal storage. Nokia merely put sixteen GB into this flagship Windows Phone, which is less than the Lumia 920'due south 32 GB, and there'due south no microSD expansion slot. Of the xvi GB, effectually 13 GB is accessible to the user out of the box, which tin quickly fill up up in one case yous outset loading apps, games, movies and music onto the smartphone.

Update: A 32 GB model is bachelor, but not as widely equally the 16 GB model; in some territories information technology's exclusive to a certain carrier, and in others it's not available at all.

Nokia assumes that the deject is a perfect substitute for depression on-device storage, simply many people including myself prefer to conserve mobile data and have large music collections on my device. After loading a small portion of my music drove (around 9 GB) onto the 925, there was just a small fraction left for other information, which is not what you want to run across from a phone trying to compete with the Galaxy S4, HTC One and iPhone 5.

While the storage effect is of some business organization, overall the performance of the Lumia 925 is excellent thank you to Microsoft and Nokia'southward efforts into optimizing the OS for a chipset that isn't current generation. Thanks to GPU acceleration every attribute is extremely smooth and fluid to utilise, and gaming performance is pretty solid likewise. It's not quite as fast as some top-end Android devices on the market place today, but in everyday usage yous probably won't notice.