Picked up my Nokia Lumia 1020—bit worried about the battery life

I picked up my pre-ordered Nokia Lumia 1020 smartphone from Harvery Norman’s yesterday. They didn’t have the ‘free’ battery grips in stock yet (that everybody got for pre-ordering) so I will have to go back and get that at some stage <insert *grumble* here>.

I got the yellow one. I keep misplacing my phone at the motel when I work away and I am hoping that a bright yellow phone might be easier to find than a white one. There is something about white and black. I seem to mentally overlook those colours when I am trying to find something.

Also, as you can see, the yellow goes well in my blue study desk mobile phone holder.

At this stage I have not tested out the 41/38MP camera so I can’t give you my opinions on that yet.

After using the Lumia 720 for almost eight months the 1020 initially feels a lot bigger and heavier, and it is bigger and heavier. But when you put them side-by-side the 1020 is not that much bigger than the 720.

One thing that is bothering me a bit is that after charging it to 100% yesterday at about 7:00 p.m. it was down to 29% this morning at 9:30 a.m. with very little use during that time. I realise that Lithium batteries need a little ‘exercising’ when they are new to get them up to their full capacity and that they don’t start to work well until after about five full charges. But having it run down to below 1/3rd remaining power overnight does worry me a bit.

Especially compared to the Lumia 720 which would go for five days even with about two hours Web browsing via 3G at night.

There is also the slightly bigger and significantly higher resolution screen that the battery has to drive. Whereas the 4.3” screen in the 720 is a 385K pixel screen, the 4.5” screen in the 1020 is a 983K pixel screen. That is 2.5 times the number of pixels that need to be powered when the phone is in use.

But even so, one of the claims to fame of the Windows Phone operating system is that it requires less CPU power to do things than Android or iOS.

I will wait until I have done at least five full re-charges before I get seriously sad about this, but at this stage the battery life is bugging me. The idea of having to charge my phone daily is not making me happy. Seriously, if the battery were to only last about 2/3rds of day then I would have look hard at going back to the 720.