Why is there no microSD slot on the Nokia Lumia 920?

Back in the day, Finnish smartphone manufacturer Nokia was one of the leaders in the smartphone industry. The company’s E Series line of devices were always the toast of the smartphone town back then but sad to say, all good things come to an end, as they say. And the beginning of the end for Nokia was the entrance of other OEMs in the smartphone competition such as Apple, HTC, Samsung and the like. This effectively relegated Nokia to the back seat of things and had to be content with watching the bad boys of the smartphone market divide all the spoils among themselves.

Nokia’s second lease on life came when it entered a strategic partnership with software giant Microsoft to begin producing handsets for the Windows Phone platform. With this, Nokia again had a shot at being relevant again in the smartphone market and it wasted no time in its bid. It released the Lumia 710 and Lumia 800 last year and this was followed by the release of the manufacturer’s flagship device, the Lumia 900 4G which was released in US shores via AT&T.

Fresh from its press event from a couple of day back when the company introduced its new line of Windows Phone 8 devices, Nokia has again proven as to why it was one of the leading manufacturers during its day. With the unveiling of the Nokia Lumia 920, it is pretty obvious that Nokia pulled out all the stops to ensure that the device will be a success.

In terms of its design and aesthetics, the Nokia Lumia 920 is almost similar to that of the Nokia Lumia 900. The device has measurements of 130.3 x 70.8 x 10.7 mm and it weighs in at 185 grams which makes it a bit hefty for comfort. This leads to a solid build quality though so there is not much complaining going on around here.

As mentioned earlier, the Nokia Lumia 920 already runs Microsoft Windows 8 for its operating system and this draws power from a QualComm MSM8960 SnapDragon chipset under the hood – incidentally the same chipset found in the internals of the Samsung Galaxy S III. This SoC gives the Nokia Lumia 920 a dual-core 1.5 GHz Krait processor and 1GB of RAM. Its storage space on the other hand is pegged at 31GB but there is no option to have this expanded.

To shed light on the matter, Executive Vce-President at Nokia Kevin Shields explained the rationale behing the omission of a memory expansion slot in the chassis of the handset. According to Shields, putting a microSD card slot in the chassis of the handset would have ruined its design and compromised its physical form. Shields even went to saying that a microSD card slot in the chassis of the Nokia Lumia 920 would have defiled it. In terms of its display, the Nokia Lumia 920 comes with a 4.5-inch PureMotion HD+ panel with a resolution of 1280 x 768 pixels while its camera department is comprised of a rear 8MP shooter and a front 1.3MP snapper.